The Burning Girl Thorne 4

by Mark Billingham

  She started to speak, but Thorne stopped her.

  "I mean the local lads. This is just some nutter, Carol. It's a kid pissing you about. It's someone who's read some poxy true-crime book and hasn't got anything better to do."

  "He knows things, Tom. Things that never came out. He knows about the lighter that was dropped at the scene, which brand of fuel was used."

  "It's someone Rooker spent time with inside, then. Rooker's told him to wind you up when he's got out."

  She shook her head. "There's no reason for Rooker to send anyone after me. He confessed, remember. Anyway, Rooker bloody well liked me."

  "He had a relationship with you. You were the one who interviewed him. Which is why you 're the one being targeted now, and not whoever the SIO was."

  "I think it's just because I'm next in line. The DCI on the case left the force well before I did. He emigrated to New Zealand ten years ago. He'd be a damn sight harder to track down than I was." It made sense, but Thorne had one other suggestion. "Or maybe, whoever it is knows that you were affected by what happened to Jessica." She looked up at him, concerned. "How would anyone know that? How do you know?"

  They walked on in silence for fifty yards or so before Thorne spoke again. "Are you worried that you put the wrong man away, Carol? Is that what this is about?"

  "No, it isn't. Gordon Rooker burned Jessica Clarke. I know he did." They didn't speak again until they reached the station. Halfway across the concourse she stopped and turned to him. "There's no need to bother waiting. I've got quarter of an hour until the next train back."

  "It's fine. I don't mind."

  "Get back to work. I like to potter about a bit anyway. I'll buy a magazine, get myself sorted. I'm a fussy old bat like that."

  "You're not fussy."

  She leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. "Cheeky sod." Thorne sighed and broke their embrace. "I don't quite know what you expect me to do about this, Carol. There's nothing I can do officially that anybody else couldn't."

  "I don't want you to do anything officially." He saw then, despite the light-hearted tone and the banter of a few moments before, just how rattled she really was. The very last thing she wanted was to let the powers-that-be see it, too. He couldn't believe that they'd take her off the Cold Case Unit, but there were plenty who thought the Met should not be using people who'd be better off queuing up in the post office.

  "Right," Thorne said eventually. "But it's OK for me to waste my time."

  Chamberlain pulled a large handbag on to her small shoulder and turned on her heels. "Something like that." Thorne watched her disappear inside WH Smith.

  Walking back towards the underground, he thought about scars that you hid, and those that you showed off. Scars bad enough to make you jump off a car-park.

  THREE

  These rooms always had one thing in common. The size might vary, the style was usually governed by age, and the decor was dependent on the whim of budgets or the inclination of the top brass. But they invariably had the same smell. Chrome and tinted glass or flaking orange plasterboard. Freezing or overheated. Intimate or anything but. Whatever the place was like, that smell would tell you where you were with a sack over your head. Thorne could sniff it up and name its constituent parts like a connoisseur: stale cigarette smoke, sweat and desperation.

  He looked around. This one had a bit of everything a fresh coat of magnolia, the fumes charged up by the heat coming off radiators a foot thick. There was a snazzy new system of coloured chairs. Blue for visitors, red for inmates.

  Most chairs were occupied, but a few red ones remained vacant. A black woman in the next row but one glanced across at him. The seat opposite her was empty. She smiled nervously, her eyes crinkling behind thick glasses, and then looked away before Thorne had a chance to smile back. He watched the woman beam as a young man her son, Thorne guessed swaggered towards her. The man grinned, then checked himself slightly, looked around to see if anyone had noticed him drop his guard. Thorne checked his watch: just before ten. He needed to get this over with as quickly as possible and get back to the office. He'd called DC

  Dave Holland earlier, on his way west across London, towards HMP Park Royal ... "I need you to cover for me," he'd said. "Tell Tughan I'm off seeing a snout, or that I'm following up a hunch, or whatever. You know, some "copper" bollocks."

  "Do I get to know what you're really doing?"

  "I'm doing someone a favour. I should be back by lunchtime if the traffic's all right, so."

  "Are you driving? When did you get the car back?" Thorne knew what was coming. He was stupid to have let it slip. "I got it back late yesterday," he'd said.

  The car in question, a pulsar-yellow BMW, was thirty years old, and Thorne had parted with a good deal of money for it the year before. Thorne thought it was a classic. Others preferred the term 'antique'. Holland, in particular, never missed an opportunity to take the piss, having maintained from the moment he'd seen it that the car was a big mistake. He'd gone to town when it had spectacularly failed its MOT and disappeared into the garage a fortnight earlier.

  "How much?" Holland had asked, gleeful. Thorne had cursed as he'd caught a red light. He'd yanked up the hand brake "It's an old car, all right? The parts are expensive." Not only were they expensive, but there seemed to be a great many of them. Thorne couldn't remember them all, but he could recall the growing feeling of despair as they were cheerfully reeled off to him. For all Thorne knew about what was going on under the bonnet, the mechanic might just as well have been speaking Serbo-Croat.

  "Five hundred?" Holland had said. "More?"

  "Listen, she's old, but she's still gorgeous. Like one of those actresses that's knocking on, but still tasty, you know?" As the car was a BMW, Thorne had tried to come up with a German actress who would fit the bill. He had failed. Felicity Kendal, he'd said as he pulled away from the lights. Yeah, that'll do.

  "She?" Holland had sounded hugely amused.

  "She's like Felicity Kendal."

  "People who call their car "she" are one step away from a pair of string-back driving gloves and a pipe." At the noise of the chair opposite him being scraped backwards, Thorne looked up and saw Gordon Rooker dropping on to the red seat. Thorne had never seen a picture, or been given a description, but there was no mistaking him.

  "Anyone sitting here?" asked Rooker, a gold tooth evident as he smiled.

  He was sixty, give or take a year or two, and tall. His face was thin and freshly shaved. The skin hung, leathery and loose, from his neck, and a full head of white hair had yellowed above the forehead with a lifetime's fags.

  Thorne nodded towards the green bib that Rooker wore, that all the prisoners wore on top of the regulation blue sweatshirts. "Very fetching," he said.

  "We've all got to wear these now," Rooker said. "A few places have had them for ages, but a lot of governors, including the one here, thought they were demeaning to the prisoners, which is all very splendid and progressive of them. Then a lifer in Gartree swaps places with his twin brother when nobody's looking and walks out through the front door. So, now it has to be obvious who's the prisoner and who isn't, and we all have to dress like prize prats when we have visitors. You think I'm making this up, don't you?"

  The voice was expressive and lively. The voice of a pub philosopher or comedian, nicely weathered by decades on forty roll-ups a day. While Rooker was speaking, Thorne had taken out his warrant card. He slid it across the table. Rooker didn't bother to look at it.

  "What do you want, Mr. Thorne?" He held up a hand. "No, don't bother, let's just have a natter. I'm sure you'll get round to it eventually."

  "I'm a friend of Carol Chamberlain."

  Rooker narrowed his eyes.

  "She'd've been Carol Manley when you knew her." The gold tooth came slowly into view again. "Did that woman ever make commissioner? I always reckoned she had it in her." Thorne shook his head. "She was a DCI when she retired. That was seven or eight years ago."

  "She was a d
ecent sort, you know?" Rooker looked away, remembering something. His eyes slid back to Thorne. "I'm not surprised she got married; she was a good-looking woman. Still fit, is she? Is she a game old bird?" He leaned across the table. "Do you like 'em a bit older?"

  Whether the suggestive comments were an attempt to unsettle or to bond, Thorne ignored them. "She's being bothered. Some lunatic is sending letters and making calls."

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "Whoever he is, he claims to be the person responsible for the attempted murder of Jessica Clarke." Thorne looked hard at Rooker, studied his face for a reaction. "He reckons he was the one who burned her, Gordon."

  There was a reaction, no question, but Thorne had no idea what Rooker was so amused about.

  "Funny?" Thorne asked.

  "Pretty funny, yeah. Like I said, I'm sorry about Miss Manley, or whatever she's called now, being bothered, but it's a laugh when you get your own personal nutter, isn't it? It's taken him long enough, mind you, whoever he is."

  "You're telling me you don't know who this person is?" Rooker turned up his palms, tucked them behind his bib. "Not a fucking clue."

  If he'd been asked at that instant to put money on whether Rooker was telling the truth, Thorne would happily have stumped up a few quid.

  "I've had plenty of letters over the years," Rooker continued, grinning. "You know, the ones in green ink where they've pressed so hard that the pen's gone through the paper. People who want me to tell them stuff, so they can have a wank over it or whatever. I've had a few mad women and what have you, writing steamy letters, saying they want to marry me."

  A case the year before when Thorne had first encountered Carol Chamberlain had begun with just that sort of letter. It had not been genuine, but plenty were, and Thorne never ceased to be amazed, and sickened, by them. "Well, Gordon, you're obviously quite a catch."

  "But this is different, right? This is sort of like a stalker in reverse. He can't stalk me, so he's stalking somebody else, somebody who was involved in it all, and he's pretending to be me. Pretending he did what I did."

  Thorne decided it was time to stop pissing about. "So he is pretending then, is he? Because that's basically why I'm here. To make sure." The cockiness, the ease, melted slowly back into the lines of Rooker's face. The shoulders drooped forward. The voice was low and level. Matter of fact.

  "You can be sure. I set fire to that girl. That's basically why I'm here."

  For half a minute, Thorne watched Rooker stare down at the table-top. His scalp was visible, pink and flaking beneath the white hair. "Like you said, though. He's waited a long time, this nutter. Why have you been here so long, Gordon?"

  The animation returned. "Ask the fucking judge. Miserable arse-hole's dead by now, if there's any justice." He laughed, humourlessly, at his own joke. "Like he'd know justice if it bit him in the bollocks."

  "It was a high-profile case," Thorne said. "You were always going to get sent down for a long one."

  "Listen, I wasn't expecting a slap on the wrists, all right? Look at what some of these bastards get away with now, though. Blokes who've carved up their wives are getting out after ten years. Less sometimes."

  Without an ounce of sympathy, knowing that he deserved every second he spent banged up, Thorne could nevertheless understand the point that Rooker was making. The twenty-year tariff or 'relevant part of the sentence' he'd been handed was more than twice many so-called 'life sentences' Thorne had seen doled out.

  "There's no fairness to it," Rooker said. "Twenty years. Twenty years on fucking VP wings."

  Thorne tried not to smirk: Vulnerable Prisoners. "Are you still vulnerable then, Gordon?"

  Rooker blinked, said nothing.

  "Still dangerous, though, apparently. Twenty years and still a Cat. B?

  You can't have been a very good boy."

  "There have been a few incidents."

  "Never mind, eh? Almost done, aren't you?"

  "Three months left until the twenty's up."

  Thorne leaned back, glanced to his right. The black woman caught his eye as she fished a crumpled tissue out of her handbag. He turned back to Rooker. "It's a coincidence, don't you reckon? This bloke turning up now, claiming responsibility."

  Rooker shook his head. "I doubt it. This is the best possible time to get the attention, isn't it? When I'm coming up for release. For possible release. Mind you, if he thinks they're going to let me out, he's dafter than I thought."

  "What is it, a DLP?"

  Rooker nodded. Once the tariff was completed, the Discretionary Lifer Panel of the Parole Board could recommend release to the Home Secretary. The panel comprised a judge, a psychiatrist and one other professional connected to the case, a criminologist or a probation officer. The review, unlike normal parole procedure, involved an oral hearing, and the prisoner could bring along a lawyer, or a friend, to represent him.

  "I've got no sodding chance," Rooker said. "I've already had a couple of knock backs in as many years." He looked at Thorne, as if expecting some sort of explanation or reassurance. He received neither. "What have I got to do? I've been to counseling, I've gone on Christ knows how many courses."

  "Remorse is important, Gordon." The word seemed almost to knock Rooker back in his seat. Thorne leaned forward. "These people are big on that, for some mysterious reason. They like to see some victim empathy, you know? Some shred of understanding about what it is that you actually did to your victim, to her family. Maybe they don't think you're sorry enough, Gordon. What do you reckon? Maybe that's the question they want answering. Where's the remorse?"

  "I held up my hand to it, didn't I? I confessed."

  "It's not the same thing."

  The scrape of Rooker's chair as he pushed himself back from the table was enough to make Thorne wince. "Are we done?" Rooker asked. Thorne eased his own chair back and looked again to his right, where the black woman was now sobbing, the tissue pressed against her mouth. He caught the eye of the man sitting opposite her. The man looked back at Thorne like he wanted to rip his head off. As promised, Tom Thorne had rung as soon as he'd left the prison. He'd told her briefly about his meeting with Rooker. She'd heard everything she'd hoped to hear, and yet the relief which Carol Chamberlain had expected was slow in coming.

  She sat at her desk, in the makeshift office she and Jack had rigged up in the spare room the year before. It was less cluttered than it had been then, a lot of junk transferred to the top of the wardrobe and stuffed beneath the spare bed, box-files piled on top of what used to be a dressing-table. It was now used as a bedroom only once or twice a year when Jack's daughter from his first marriage made the effort to visit.

  Jack shouted up to her from downstairs. "I'm making some tea, love. D'you want some?"

  "Please."

  Chamberlain could never understand those colleagues' ex-colleagues who insisted that they couldn't remember certain cases. She was bemused by those who struggled to recall the names and faces of certain rapists and murderers; or their victims. Yes, you forgot a file number, or the colour of a particular vehicle, of course you did, but the people stayed with you. They stayed with her at any rate. And she knew that they stayed with Tom Thorne, too. She recalled him telling her once that the faces he could never forget were those he'd never seen. The ones belonging to the killers he had never caught. The smug faces he imagined on those that had got away with it. Perhaps those who claimed not to remember had developed some technique for forgetting; some trick of the trade. If so, she wished that she'd been a bit closer to some of them, spent a few more nights in curry houses or out on the piss. If she had, they might have passed the secret on to her.

  For reasons she wasn't ready to admit to herself, she hadn't wanted to pull the Jessica Clarke files officially, to draw any attention to herself or to the case. Instead, she'd called in a favour, gone down to the General Registry in Victoria, and taken a quick look while an old friend's back was turned. Within a few seconds of opening the first battered brown fol
der, she could see that she'd remembered Gordon Rooker perfectly. The face in the faded black-and-white ID photo was exactly as she'd been picturing it since the night when she'd received that first phone call.

  "I burned her."

  It was still the face she pictured now, despite the two decades that had passed. She'd tried, since speaking to Thorne, to age the image mentally, to give it the white hair and lines that Thorne had described, but without any success.

  She guessed this was the way memory worked.

  A colleague on the Cold Case Unit, now a man in his early sixties, had worked on the Moors Murders case. He told her that when he thought about Hindley and Brady, he still saw those infamous pictures of them, smug and sunken-eyed. He could never imagine the raddled old man and the smiling, mumsy brunette.

  Bizarrely, Carol Chamberlain needed to remember Rooker's face. She equated this total recall of him with the confidence she had in his guilt. It was an illogical, ridiculous collision of ideas, and yet, to her, it made perfect sense. His face, the one she knew every inch of, was the face of the man she saw kneeling by the fence. His face, the one she remembered smiling across an interview room, was the face of the man she saw running away, exhilarated, down the hill, away from the school.

  She clung to that memory now, her grip stronger since the call from Thorne. Of course, there had been doubt, and she knew, from his question about Rooker at the station, that Thorne had sensed it. It had sprouted in the dark and pushed as she'd sat shivering. It had grown like a weed, forcing its way up through the cracks in a slab as she'd lain awake.

  "I burned her."

  Now, thankfully, that doubt was dying. It had begun to shrivel from the moment she'd picked up the phone and made that call to Thorne. Now Thorne had been to see Rooker and heard him confirm it. Heard him confess it, again.

  There was relief, but it could never be complete, for while the remembrance of Rooker's face was oddly comforting, there was also the face of Jessica Clarke to consider.

  Chamberlain had seen photos; snaps of a smiling teenager, pale skin and dark hair down past her shoulders. She could still see the hands of the parents trembling as they lifted wooden picture frames from a sideboard, but the girl's face the smooth, perfect face she'd had before had been all too easy to forget.