The Burning Girl Thorne 4

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne thought about all the cliches. It was hard to think of hope as something that sprang eternal, but easy to see it being crushed and dashed. Hope died violently. It was bludgeoned and it was burned. Hope was something that bled.

  He dropped some papers he hadn't bothered looking at into a drawer, and slammed it shut. The action distracted him from the face of the woman on the tube train. The sound drowned out the noise of nothing rattling in the bottom of her chewed polystyrene cup.

  Thorne had read plenty the night before about trafficking. He knew about women being kidnapped, forced into heroin addiction and the vice trade. He guessed that the Zarifs were involved in that particularly lucrative area of human trading.

  He knew that there were worse things than begging . At the sound of raised voices outside the door, Thorne looked up. Holland knocked and stuck his head in. "They've found the lorry driver," he said. He pushed the door further open and stepped into the office. "In some woods behind a lay-by on the A7."

  "How?" Thorne asked.

  "Shot in the head ."

  "Nice."

  "But not until they'd smashed half of it to pulp with a dirty great tree branch."

  "The A7," Kitson said. "That's the main road between Edinburgh and Carlisle. My ex had family up there ."

  Holland had his notebook in his hand and began flipping through the pages.

  Thorne had been right on the nail at the morning briefing. It looked like the lorry had been hijacked after coming into Scotland on the route he'd described. The cargo would have been loaded on to another vehicle, then the original lorry driven south and dumped at Chieveley.

  Holland had found what he was looking for. "Right," he said. "The lay-by was just north of Galashiels. It was the Lothian and Borders boys who found the bodies."

  "Found the what?' Thorne said.

  "There were two other bodies. Three altogether." Holland looked from Thorne to Kitson. "No identification on them. Gunshot wounds to the head."

  Kitson spat out the breath in her lungs like it had suddenly become foul. She took a mouthful of fresher air. "A couple of them put up a fight, maybe?" She looked to Thorne.

  He nodded. "Or tried to run."

  "I think that's the theory they're working on," Holland said. Thorne immediately pictured the two men thrashing desperately through woods in the dark. Tearing, breathless, through wet leaves and sprawling over rotting stumps. He saw them fall before the echo of the shots had died away. He knew that whatever last word passed through their heads the second before the bullet did, it had certainly not been umit. He had been taught a Turkish toast; maybe he should go back and learn a few Turkish prayers.

  The door opened wider and Holland stepped aside as Brigstocke and Tughan marched in.

  "Ten bodies now," Tughan said. "Double figures. This has to stop."

  Double figures? Tughan was making it sound as if the Ryan-Zarif turf war had now exceeded some unspoken quota of acceptable victims. Thorne had known stranger things to be true, but, for whatever reason, he had the impression that the plan to 'disrupt' had been superseded in light of the news from north of the border. Tughan certainly looked as if he now had something rather more direct in mind.

  Brigstocke swept a hand through his thick, black hair, nudged his glasses with a knuckle. "Ten bodies, and the civilian victims are starting to outnumber the soldiers."

  "Let's stop pissing around with monkeys then," Thorne said. "Go straight for the organ-grinders ."

  Tughan held up a hand. "That's exactly what we're going to do."

  "All right." Thorne was thinking: I've got a date later, but there's still time. I needn't hang around too long. Finchley is a bit of a schlep, and trickier in terms of just dropping by, but Green Lanes isn't too far out of my way .

  "We will put Billy Ryan away," Tughan said. "We'll get him with the Rooker case, and we'll get the Zarif brothers as well, eventually. Right now, our top priority has to be preventing any more deaths."

  "Eventually' was one word that Thorne hadn't wanted to hear.

  "I'm going to the detective chief superintendent in the first instance and he may well have to take it higher. We'll make an official approach to Ryan, almost certainly through his solicitor, and we'll do the same thing to the Zarif family, probably via a community leader, or perhaps a priest." Tughan was nodding to nobody in particular, as if he were trying to convince himself of something. "Things have got to the point now where intervention might well do us as much good as investigation. Sitting down with these people is not something we do every day of the week, but if getting them around a table might help us put a stop to this fucking chaos, I'm happy to do it." Thorne looked thoughtful for a second or two before he spoke. He was thinking it was no great surprise that Tughan was not exactly proposing to kick anybody's door in.

  "Do we have to provide the sandwiches?" he said.

  "Where you going?" The man behind the simple wooden counter asked the question with only the most cursory glance up from his newspaper. The thick accent transformed the three words into one: Werrugoeen?

  "I'm not going anywhere," Thorne said, 'but you're going back there to tell your boss that somebody wants to have a quick word with him." Thorne looked hard at the man who was now giving him his full attention. He pointed back over the man's shoulder towards the dimly lit space behind him. He knew that a second man, sitting on a tatty armchair in the corner behind and to the left of him was also studying him intently.

  Thorne held up his warrant card. "Quick as you can." The man slapped down his paper, snorted back phlegm and disappeared into the gloom.

  The minicab office consisted of little more than a waiting room the size of a cupboard. An unpainted door to the right of the hatch led back into any number of rooms behind. Thorne guessed that the drivers themselves would be sitting nearby in their dodgy Vauxhalls and Toyotas, or perhaps waiting in the Zarifs' cafe next door. He turned and watched a few seconds of a film he didn't recognise on the TV bolted above the front door. The local news might be on the other side, might be showing the three goals Spurs had put past Everton earlier in the day. He let his eyes drop to the man on the armchair. The latter raised an eyebrow as if they were both just frustrated customers waiting for a lift home. He held Thorne's stare for longer than was strictly necessary before standing and walking through the side door towards the rear of the office.

  A few seconds after it had closed, the door opened and Memet Zarif stepped into the waiting room. At the same time, Thorne was aware of the man he'd first spoken to resuming his position behind the counter. A few feet further back, hovering in the shadows, stood the man who'd been sitting in the armchair.

  "You want a cab, Mr. Thorne?" Memet said. He wore a simple white shirt, buttoned at the collar, over black trousers and tasselled loafers.

  Thorne smiled. "No, thanks. I think I'd like to get home in one piece. Last minicab I took, the driver didn't know that a red light meant stop ."

  "My drivers know what they're doing."

  "You sure?"

  "Of course."

  "They know how to fill out insurance forms, do they?"

  Memet laughed, glancing across to the men behind the counter and nodding towards Thorne. The man from the armchair moved forward and stood at the shoulder of the receptionist. He spat some Turkish in Thorne's direction.

  Thorne whipped his head round and smiled. "Same to you," he said. He turned back to Memet, still smiling at the tremendous fun they were all having. "So, you don't think it would be worth my while getting a few officers round here, checking that all your cars and all your fantastic drivers are fully insured?" Thorne was fighting against the sound of gunfire from the TV set. He raised his voice: "I'd be wasting my time, would I?"

  The noise from the TV suddenly dropped enough for Thorne to hear Memet sigh. "Do you think we are stupid?"

  It seemed to Thorne that everyone was awfully keen to tell him that the likes of Memet Zarif and Billy Ryan were anything but stupid. He didn't doubt that t
hey were careful, but he refused to buy into a myth that he and his team were up against the gangland chapter of Mensa. Thorne had caught his fair share of supposedly clever villains, and he knew equally that plenty were thick as shit and doing very nicely for themselves. He knew that, actually, the most successful villains got by on instinct, like many of those who were out to catch them. Instinct was fallible, though, as Thorne knew only too well. Do you think we are stupid?

  Memet was certainly clever enough to load a simple question with meaning. He was no longer talking about a minicab firm . Thorne moved past Memet, talking as he pushed open the wooden side door and stepped into a dimly lit corridor. "I like what you've done with this place," he said. Through the thin wall, he could hear the men behind the counter moving round to intercept him. Memet was following as Thorne walked calmly along a strip of greasy linoleum. The place smelled faintly musty. Flakes of magnolia paint crackled under his shoes.

  "Did you do it yourself, or did you get professionals in?"

  "What do you want, Mr. Thorne?"

  They walked past the doorway that led to the reception hatch. The two hired hands stared at Thorne, then looked to Memet for instructions. At the end of the corridor was a small, gloomy living room. The three men sitting around the table put down their playing cards and looked up as Thorne approached. Hassan Zarif made to stand up, then relaxed as he saw his older brother looming at Thorne's shoulder. Thorne took the scene in fast. The two other men at the table were Tan, the youngest brother, and the heavyset man he'd seen at the cafe with Hassan when he'd been in there with Holland. For a few seconds, the only noise was the muffled soundtrack from the TV in the waiting room and the bubbling of the air filter in a large tank of tropical fish sitting on an oak sideboard.

  Thorne pointed to the table. The pile of crumpled five-and ten-pound notes in the middle was about to spill on to the carpet. "I could make up a four for bridge if you fancy it," he said.

  Memet pushed past him and took the empty seat at the table. "Just say what you've come to say."

  "It's funny, you talking back there about drivers. It reminds me: they found the driver of your lorry."

  Memet shrugged, looked confused. "Our lorry ?" Hassan leaned across and spoke to him in Turkish. Memet nodded.

  "The police at Thames Valley called me about it yesterday morning," Hassan said. He spoke to Memet and Tan as if he were filling them in on some minor business glitch. "The lorry wasn't damaged, as far as they can tell, and the haulier will claim for their lost load, so I didn't think there was any need to contact our insurance company." He looked up at Thorne. "I haven't had the chance to talk to my brothers about it yet, but it's fairly trivial."

  "Pass on our gratitude to the officers who found it," Memet said. Thorne had to concede that they played it well. "It wasn't very trivial for the driver," Thorne said. "They found him with half his head missing."

  The heavyset man failed to conceal a smile. He looked down and began to tidy up the notes when he saw that Thorne had caught it. Hassan ran a hand back and forth across his prominent chin. The stubble rasped against his palm. "Well, that clears one thing up at least," he said. "We can assume that the driver wasn't in league with the hijackers."

  Memet did a convincing enough job of looking shocked and saddened, though Thorne knew very well that the news would have come as something of a relief. A dead driver was a driver who wouldn't be telling the police anything. "They killed him?" he said, turning to Hassan. "For what? What was this lorry carrying?"

  Playing it very well. Certainly far from stupid.

  "I think the police said it was CD players," Hassan said. Thorne corrected him. "DVD players, actually. The good news is that they didn't get the entire load."

  The heavyset man carried on straightening banknotes, but now the three brothers looked directly at Thorne. Memet's face was a blank. Hassan was trying too hard to look no more than innocently curious. Tan was persevering with the hard man glare.

  "That's right," Thorne said. "Apparently, a couple of the DVD players were shot, trying to run away."

  Only Memet Zarif was able to hold the look, to continue to meet Thorne's eye.

  "Don't worry, I'll get straight in touch if we find any more," Thorne said. "Just thought you'd be interested in what we'd established so far."

  More bubbles from the fish tank. Voices from the TV along the corridor.

  As Thorne turned to leave, he became aware of another figure seated in the corner to his right and a little behind him. He stared until the man leaned slowly forward and his face moved from shadow into light. Thorne recognised him as the son of Muslum and Hanya Izzigil. Thorne took a step towards the boy. "Yusuf." It may just have been the light, but the boy's eyes seemed changed. The previous month, with his parents dead in the next room, they had brimmed with tears, but that was not the only difference that Thorne could see. There was a challenge in their stillness, in their deadness, and in the set of the boy's shoulders as he stared at the man who'd failed so miserably to provide him with any justice. Clearly, there had been others who'd made him promises they had more chance of keeping.

  "We are taking care of Yusuf now," Hassan said. Thorne stared at the boy for a few seconds more, looking for a sign that some part of him might not yet have become theirs. He saw only that the boy was lost. He turned, and moved slowly back the way he'd come in. "I'll let you get back to your game ."

  "Are you sure you don't want that cab home?" Memet asked. Thorne said nothing, his back to them.

  Tan Zarif spoke up for the first time. "We'll do you a very good price," he said. "Green Lanes to Kentish Town for a fiver. How's that sound?"

  Thorne felt something tighten in his gut at the revelation implicit in the simple details of the journey. He turned and looked deep into Tan's eyes, trying to swallow back the panic and sound casual. "I thought we'd talked about this," he said. "Drop the "we know where you live" hard man shit or change the look." He drew a finger from ear to ear along the line of his jaw, the same line marked out on Tan by his pencil-thin beard. "The George Michael thing is scaring nobody ." Thorne took a deep breath and held it as he walked quickly back along the corridor, through the empty reception area and out on to the street. He let the breath out and turned to see Arkan Zarif staring at him from the doorway of the cafe.

  The old man raised his hand as Thorne came towards him, brought it up to his mouth. "You come inside for coffee? For suklak, maybe ?" Thorne slowed his pace, but kept on heading towards his car. "I can't. I've got to be somewhere ."

  It was true that he had less than an hour to get home, shower and change, but that wasn't the only reason why he'd refused the old man's invitation. Even if he'd had the time, Thorne knew that the coffee would have tasted even more bitter than usual.

  When he thought about the burning girl, he often thought about the others, too. About her friends.

  They'd been the first to see it, of course, to spot the flames. The one who had been standing closest, the one who really was Alison Kelly, screamed like it had been her who was on fire. He'd jumped slightly, perhaps even cried out as the scream had moved through him like a blade. He'd turned his head towards the noise then, and seen the flames reflected in the girl's eyes. They were dark brown and very wide, and the flames that were growing, that were climbing up the girl who was actually burning, seemed tiny, dancing in her friend's eyes in that second before he'd turned and run. He still remembered how small they had seemed, flickering against the dark brown. How far away. As he'd rushed away down that steep hill, careering towards the car, that scream had followed him. He could feel the echo of it at his back, rolling down the hillside after him, all but knocking him off his feet as he went. Then the screams had grown, of course, louder and more hysterical, pushing him downhill even faster. He'd stood still for just a second or two before jumping into the car, and he remembered that moment now vividly. Remembered the shortness of breath and the picture on the backs of his eyelids. He'd closed his eyes and the shape of the fl
ames had still been there, imprinted. Gold and red edges bleeding into the blackness.

  A snapshot of the flames. The ones he'd seen jumping in the eyes of the girl he'd been sent there to kill.

  SEVENTEEN

  "How did you get my number, anyway?" Thorne asked. Alison Kelly put down her glass, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "On your card?"

  Thorne smiled and shook his head. Like everyone else on the job, he had a generic Metropolitan Police business card. It gave the address of Becke House, together with the phone and fax numbers at the office. It bore the legend 'Working for a safer London', printed in blue as a jaunty scribble. It left a space to write in mobile, pager or other numbers.

  "I never write down my home phone number," Thorne said. "You didn't get it out of the phone book, either ."

  She still wasn't giving anything away.

  "You got my number the same way you found out everything else, right?"

  They were sitting in a corner of the Spice of Life at Cambridge Circus. Alison nursed a large gin and tonic. Thorne was on the Guinness, and enjoying it. The lounge contained acres of red velvet, far too many brass rails and, inexplicably, was crammed with annoyingly healthy-looking Scandinavian tourists.

  Thorne tore open a packet of crisps, grabbed a handful. "I'm not going to get a straight answer, am I?"

  "I was a gangster's daughter until I was fourteen," she said. "Then everything changed. Everything. Dad walked away from it all and took us and a great big bag of his tasteless "new" money with him. Spent the rest of his life playing golf and doing crosswords in his conservatory. A couple of years later, Billy and I were together, but once that marriage was over, I was completely out of it. I was out of the life, and that's how I wanted it. Gangland was just something Mum and I saw on the TV, and I was just a lowly legal secretary with a Page 129