The Burning Girl Thorne 4

by Mark Billingham

  '...and his desire to prevent any further bloodshed." Ryan looked along the table at Thorne. "Are you going to write that down?" Thorne thought, I'd like to take this pen and write something across your face, you smug little shitehawk.

  He wrote: Ryan. Disgust. Desire.

  Jesmond snapped a biscuit in half, careful to shake the crumbs on to the plate. "I don't need to tell any of you that this is what we want to hear. But we need action if anything's going to change. If this bloodshed you refer to is really going to stop."

  "Of course," Zarif said.

  Ryan held up his hands: Goes without saying.

  Jesmond put on his glasses, reached for a piece of paper and started to read the names printed on it. "Anthony Wright. John Gildea. Sean Anderson. Michael Clayton. Muslum Izzigil. Hanya Izzigil. Detective Sergeant Marcus Moloney." Jesmond paused there, looked around the table. "Most recently, Francis Cullen, a long-distance lorry-driver and two as yet unidentified bodies found along with his." Thorne looked at Ryan, then at Zarif. Both wore serious expressions, suitably sombre in response to the roll-call of victims. Those they had lost. Those they had murdered.

  "These are the deaths we know about." Jesmond said. "These are the murders we are currently investigating, all of which, to some degree, have involved your families or your businesses." Ryan's solicitor tried to cut in.

  Jesmond held up a hand. "Have, at the very least, affected your families or your businesses. Miss Brimson?"

  "I have advised my client that, for the purposes of this meeting, he should say nothing in relation to any specific case on which you might ask him to comment."

  "Who's being specific?" Thorne asked. He received an icy smile. '"Might", I said. Might."

  "I'll make sure I underline it," Thorne said. Zarif poured himself a second cup of coffee. "It's a shame that this is your attitude, Mr. Ryan. It is people's refusal to speak about these things, to get involved, that is so dangerous. It's what makes these murders possible."

  The old man next to him tugged at his beard, nodding enthusiastically.

  "There are some in my community who are afraid to speak up," Zarif said. He looked towards Jesmond. "We had thought that those in Mr. Ryan's. circle might be a little less fearful." Zarif was pressing all the right buttons. Ryan's anger was controlled but obvious.

  For a long ten seconds no one spoke. Thorne listened to the sound of the cars on the nearby motorway, the rattle of a fan above one of the ceiling vents. The weather had taken a turn for the better in recent days and the room felt arid and airless.

  "These killings, whoever and whatever the victims might have been, are simply unacceptable," Jesmond said eventually. "They hurt people across a wide range of communities. They hurt people and they hurt businesses."

  Thorne wrote, thinking, They hurt your chances of promotion. Ryan smiled thinly. "Sometimes they're the same thing."

  "I'm sorry?" Jesmond said.

  "People and business." Ryan leaned forward, looked hard at Zarif across the table. "Sometimes, your business might actually be people. You know what I mean?"

  Now it was Zarif's turn to exercise some control. He knew that Ryan was talking about the people smuggling, about the hijack. He turned to the old man next to him and muttered something in Turkish. When Zarif had finished, the Turkish-speaking officer translated for Jesmond. "There was some swearing," she began. Thorne looked at Zarif's face. He wasn't surprised.

  "Mr. Zarif said that some people should think a little about what they were saying before they opened their mouths. opened their stupid mouths."

  Thorne looked from Ryan to Zarif, in the vain hope that the two of them might clamber on to the table and get stuck into each other. Go on, he thought, Let's end it here and now.

  Jesmond thanked the WPC. Thorne looked across and caught her eye. He'd forgotten her name. He knew that she was there to ensure that any incriminating statement could be noted, however inadmissible it would later prove to be. He knew there was fat chance of anything much that mattered being said by anybody. This was politics and pussyfooting. The whole seemingly pointless exercise was about what was not being said.

  "We need to be united in our efforts," Jesmond said. He looked around the table until he was satisfied that tempers were being held in check.

  "There seems little point in continuing', Brimson said, 'if my client has to sit here and be insulted."

  Thorne glanced at her and Ryan. Their arms were touching, and he idly began to wonder if they might be sleeping together. He knew Brimson was only doing her job, but surely there had to be some other reason why the bile wasn't rising into her mouth. "Would Mr. Ryan prefer to sit here and be insulted?" he said.

  Ryan didn't bother looking up. "Fuck you, Thorne." Thorne turned innocently to Jesmond. "Should I write that down?"

  "I want to get two messages across to you this morning," Jesmond said.

  "The first, and I want there to be no mistake about this, is that, as far as the murders I have already mentioned are concerned, we are in no way scaling down any of those investigations."

  "No way," Thorne repeated.

  Jesmond glanced at him, nodded. "Some of you will already know this, but DI Thorne is one of the officers actively involved in seeking those responsible."

  Thorne was tempted to give a little wave.

  "The second message is by way of a direct appeal." Jesmond removed his glasses, slid them into his top pocket. "We want this level of consultation to continue, for everyone's benefit. On behalf of the Commissioner, I'm appealing to you directly. We want you to use your influence. As businessmen. As important members of your communities. We want you to do whatever you can to prevent further loss of life." Thorne's pen moved across the paper. He was struggling to keep up with Jesmond's speech. He sat there, hot and headachey, fighting the urge to doodle.

  Fifteen minutes later, the waitress knocked and entered. She asked if the biscuits needed replenishing, but the meeting was already starting to break up. Ryan and Zarif left a minute or two apart, each chatting animatedly with his adviser.

  Jesmond gathered up his papers. "How would you say that went, Tom?" He didn't wait for the answer, perhaps guessing that it would be a long time coming. "I know. These kind of meetings are buggers to get right." He snapped his briefcase shut. "Let's just hope we get something out of it."

  With the possible exception of writer's cramp, Thorne doubted it. Methodical in this, as she was in everything up one aisle then down another, missing none of them out Carol Chamberlain steered her way past a small logjam near the checkouts, and turned towards detergents, kitchen towels and toilet roll.

  Jack appeared, grinning at the side of the trolley, and dropped large handfuls of shopping into it. "Do we need dog food?" he asked. Chamberlain nodded, then watched her husband head up the aisle and disappear round the corner. She moved on slowly, picking things off the shelves. Reach, drop, push. Methodical, but miles away.

  When we get Ryan, he's going to tell us who took his money twenty years ago and burned Jessica. He's going to give me a name!

  Thorne had made her a promise. He'd told her he was going to find the man who'd been responsible for what had happened twenty years before. He'd told her that he was going to put right her mistake. He'd told her what he thought she wanted to hear. That had been more than a fortnight ago, round at his flat, and she hadn't seen Thorne since. She hadn't spoken to him on the phone for almost as long. She knew he was busy, of course, knew that he had far better things to do than keep her up to date.

  Reach, drop, push.

  Her cold case from 1993, the murdered bookie, was going nowhere. There was nothing in it to get the blood fizzing in her veins. Nothing to distract her.

  Naturally, it was how Jack preferred it. He relished the calm at the end of the day, the fact that she had nothing, of any shape or form, to bring home. He was happier now that she rarely needed to be away from home at all. She loved him fiercely, knew that he felt as he did only because he loved her just as much
. She'd have been lost without him, helpless without the anchor of his concern. But, feeling as she felt now, as she'd felt since this had all begun, that anchor was starting to pull her down.

  She wanted this to be over.

  Reach, drop, push.

  Tom Thorne was the man in whom she'd placed her hopes. She'd had no choice but to do so. Much as Chamberlain liked and respected him, she hated feeling beholden. Hated the fact that it was out of her hands. Hated it.

  She wanted to load up her trolley, pile it high with heavy bottles and tins, and charge, shouting, down the aisle. She wanted to watch the families and the shelf-stackers scatter as she ran at them. She wanted to hear the rattle of the trolley and the squawking of two-way radios as she burst past the tills and flattened the guards, and rushed at the plate-glass windows.

  Jack came hurrying towards her, clutching cans of dog food to his chest. As soon as they'd tumbled noisily into the trolley, she reached out and slid her arm around his. They moved together towards the next aisle.

  23 August 1986

  The new Smiths album is awesome. It's got "Bigmouth Strikes Again' on it and Dad still puts his head round the door if he hears it, and laughs when it gets to the "Joan of Arc'line. Ali's got a boyfriend! She met him at some club. I don't know when she went clubbing, or who she went with, but apparently this bloke just walked up to her and asked if she wanted a drink. I met him the other day and he seems nice enough, but when he said hello to me, like everything was normal, he kept looking at AH, so she could see how 'sensitive' he was being, like he was checking to see what she thought of him.

  I don't know if they've really done anything vet. There's another bloke who she says she's got a big crush on as well. AH has a crush on somebody different every week. This one's much older than she is, which is why she's so keen, if you ask me. Also, he used to work with her dad, which means that he's probably got a nickname like Ron "The Butcher or something. AH always used to joke about trying it on with one of those blokes, one of her dad's friends. You know, flirting with them and saying, "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me? Oh, it's a gun." There's another song on the album called "I Know It's Over'. I was listening to it on my headphones and there's a bit where Morrissey is singing about feeling soil falling over his head. Like that's how it feels when this relationship he's been in has finished, when he's been dumped or whatever. I was trying to imagine it. Like I'd been with someone and he'd finished with me. I was lying there with it on loud and my eyes closed, putting myself in that position. For a while, it made me feel deep and romantic, like some poet or something.

  Then, suddenly, I started feeling angry and stupid and I couldn't stand to listen to it again. I always skip that track now. The words and the melody were making me cry, making me want to cry, but the feelings weren't real. The emotion behind it was fake. I'd thought that pity from other people was painful enough, but when I start pitying myself, that's just about as bad as it gets.

  I'm not likely to have a fucking relationship, that's the simple truth, and if by some miracle I did, you wouldn't need to be Mastermind to figure out why it might not work. Unless I got it together with some other Melt-Job, of course. You know, our eyes meet across a crowded plastic surgeon's waiting room.

  No chance of that. Just because Hook like I do, doesn't mean I have to fancy other people who look the same, does it?

  Being dumped wouldn't make me sad. It would make me want to kill whoever I'd been having the relationship with for being such a wanker. Such a cowardly shithead.

  I don't want to have a relationship anyway.

  Reading all that back, it sounds so pathetic. Like I'm some brat and I'm pretending that I want to be on my own because I'm really feeling so sorry for myself. I can't help how it sounds. I know what I think.

  Shit Moment of the Day.

  Decided not to bother with this any more because it's stupid. Magic Moment of the Day

  Ditto.

  TWENTY

  "Tell me again about the meeting with Ryan. Tell me what he said that night in Epping Forest."

  Rooker was wreathed in cigarette smoke. His sigh blew a tunnel of boredom through the fug. "Is there nothing else you could be doing?" he asked. "It's not as though I'm suddenly going to remember something I haven't already told you, is it?"

  Thorne stared at the tapes in the twin-cassette deck. Watched the red spools spinning. "I don't know."

  "Not after twenty years. Do you not think I've had enough time to remember?"

  "Or enough time to forget."

  "Oh for fuck's sake."

  It had been nearly a month now since the attack on the girl in Swiss Cottage. Nearly a month since the Powers That Be had agreed to take Gordon Rooker up on his offer to give evidence against Billy Ryan. Tughan had told Thorne the day before the day of the round-table session in Maidenhead that, all being well, Ryan was likely to be charged within a week or so.

  The case was being carefully built on a number of fronts; many of the people connected with Rooker and Ryan back in 1984 had been sought out and questioned. Some were still in the game. Some had long since sloped off to the suburbs. Others had gone even further, to countries with better weather and more attractive tax systems. A few had talked, but not enough for Tughan and his team to feel confident. Omerta, the Mafia called it: the code of silence. The foreign language and associations made it sound honourable, dignified even, but there was no honour or dignity in the lives of these people, hiding out in villas, mock-Spanish and otherwise, shitting themselves. Thorne would have liked to spend some time with a few of these old fuckers, these fossilised hardmen in Braintree and Benidorm. He wanted to slap their stupid, per ma-tanned faces and press a picture of Jessica Clarke up close.

  "Like I told you before," Rooker said, "I got the call from Harry Little and drove up to meet Ryan in Epping Forest. A track near Loughton."

  One way and another, Rooker's testimony was going to be key, and, as with all evidence from convicted criminals, it would not be hard to discredit. If it was given any credit in the first place. Whatever happened, they had to be sure it was nailed down tight.

  "You got into his car." Thorne said.

  "I got into his car."

  "What kind of car was it?"

  Rooker looked up, stared at Thorne like he was mad. "How the fuck should I know? It was dark. It was twenty years ago." Thorne sat back, like he'd proved a point. "Details are important, Gordon. Ryan's defence team are going to slaughter you if you give them a chance. If you can't remember the car, maybe you can't really remember exactly what Ryan said. Maybe you were confused. Maybe you thought he was asking you to do something when he wasn't. You with me?"

  "It might have been a Merc. One of those old ones with the big radiators."

  "Do you understand what I'm saying? This is why we have to do this." Rooker nodded, reluctantly. "I wasn't confused," he said. The door opened and Thorne muttered his thanks as a guard stepped in with drinks. Tea for him. A can of cheap cola for Rooker. The guard closed the door behind him. The drinks were taken.

  "This is warm," Rooker said.

  "When you got into his car, did Ryan come straight out and say what he wanted or did you talk about other stuff first?"

  "He wasn't really the type to chat about the weather, you know? We might have talked about this and that for a couple of minutes, I suppose. People we both knew."

  "Harry Little?"

  "Yeah, Harry. Other faces, what have you. I don't remember him beating around the bush for very long, though."

  "So, he asked if you'd be willing to kill Kevin Kelly's daughter, Alison?"

  Rooker puffed out his cheeks, prepared to trot out the answers one more time. Thorne asked the question again.

  "Yes."

  "In exchange for money that he would give you."

  "Yes."

  "How much? How much was he proposing to pay you to kill Alison Kelly?"

  Rooker looked up quickly, stared at Thorne. A charge ran bet
ween them, flashed across the metal tabletop. Thorne realised, shocked, that this had not come up before.

  Rooker seemed equally taken aback. "I think it was about twelve grand."

  "You think about?"

  "It was twelve grand. Twelve thousand pounds." He said something else, something about what that sort of money might be worth now. Thorne had stopped listening. Now he knew what Alison Kelly's life had been worth. He was wondering whether he would have told her -the exact amount had he known it on the night he'd started whispering truths to her in the dark. Thinking that he probably shouldn't have said anything at all. "Did Ryan say why he wanted you to do this?"

  "He was trying to get at Kevin Kelly, wasn't he?" Rooker said. "He wanted him to take on the other firms. He wanted to take over."

  "I know all that. I'm not talking about that. Did he say why he was trying to do it by killing a child? You said yourself that it was extreme. That it was out of the ordinary."

  "Right. Which is why I walked away. But, beyond what I've already told you, I don't know anything else. Same with all the jobs I did back then. Why was never my business."

  Thorne took a slurp of tea. He opened his mouth to ask something else, but Rooker cut him off.

  "How many more times do we have to do this?"

  "This is probably the last time," Thorne said. "The last time we need to go over it, at any rate. I'm not saying there won't be further interviews with other officers."

  "Tell me about afterwards."

  "The trial?"

  "After the trial. Tell me about what happens to me." It was Thorne's turn to sigh. This was an area which Rooker seemed keen to keep going over.