The Burning Girl Thorne 4

by Mark Billingham

  "Any ID?"

  "Yes, sir. According to Mrs. Ryan, the dead man is her husband, William John Ryan."

  Thorne stepped carefully around the bloodstains that grew bigger as he neared the doorway. The door was ajar. He nudged it all the way open with his shoe.

  Ryan was on the kitchen floor, curled close into a corner, one hairy forearm streaked with red and propped up oddly against a cupboard. His white shirt was sopping dark patches soaking through the silk at the shoulder and beneath the arm. The good-sized gash in his neck still wept a little blood, the lines of grout running red between the terra cotta floor-tiles.

  You didn't need a medical degree.

  Thorne was aware that the uniform had joined him at the door. He glanced at him, then looked back to Billy Ryan. "So, what's the story?" he asked.

  "The story's a bloody odd one. She just walked in and stuck a knife in him, by all accounts. Over and over again."

  Thorne swung around, stunned. "His wife killed him?"

  "No, sir. Not his wife." The uniform turned, nodded towards the doorway from which he'd first appeared. "The other woman." Thorne pushed past him, moved down the corridor without a word. He could feel the breath rushing from his lungs, could hear a noise that grew louder in his head, like wasps trapped beneath a cup. He knew what he was going to see.

  The two officers sitting on the sofa stood up, their faces grim-set, when Thorne entered the living room. The woman, handcuffed to one of them at the wrist, had little choice but to rise with him. A WPC on the other side of her stared at Thorne, waiting, her hand clasped tight around Alison Kelly's elbow.

  Thorne opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. There was nothing he could think of to say. Alison looked at him for a second or two. He was sure she gave him a small nod before she lowered her head.

  APRIL

  IMMORTAL SKIN

  TWENTY-TWO

  A couple of years before, while driving to work early one morning, Thorne had been shaken by the sight of a horse-drawn hearse coming at him out of the mist. He'd pulled over and stared as the thing had rattled by. The breath of the horses had hung in front of their soft mouths like smoke before drifting back through the black feathers of their plumes.

  The genuine spookiness of that moment came back to Thorne now as he watched the undertakers slide the coffin from an almost identical glass-sided carriage. If there was one person he would not wish to be haunted by, it was Billy Ryan.

  St. Pancras Cemetery was the largest in London. While not as well known as Highgate or Kensal Green, and with fewer grand monuments or famous residents, it was nevertheless an impressive and atmospheric place. Thorne watched as the pall-bearers hefted the coffin on to their shoulders and began to move slowly away from the main avenue. The vast acreage, shared with Islington Cemetery, stood on the site of the notorious Finchley Common, once the killing ground of highwaymen Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard. It was an appropriate place, too, Thorne decided, for Billy Ryan to go into the ground and rot. The hearse could go no further. The beautifully tended beds near the cemetery entrance had given way quickly to overgrown woodland that in places was virtually impenetrable. The elegant displays of daffodils, tulips and pansies had been replaced by nettles, brambles and a jungle of ivy that crept across the doorways of burial chambers and grasped the stone wings of smiling angels.

  "Pardon me, sir."

  Thorne stepped aside to let one of the funeral directors pass. He and three others beside him were hurrying to catch up with their colleagues. They each carried vast floral tributes: crosses, wreaths, arrangements that spelled out "DAD' and "BILLY'. Dozens more were already being lined up at the roadside. A great day for Interflora.

  Thorne had glanced at the notice board near the entrance as the procession had swung in through the main gates. There were half a dozen other funerals taking place that morning. Three were listed as being for babies, with the words "No Mourners' handwritten beneath their typed entries on the timetable.

  The Ryan bash was definitely the main event.

  Times had certainly changed for the Ryan family and those like them. There was still a profit in vice and gambling, but the big money was in drugs. It was a dirty business in every sense and had only got dirtier since Johnny Foreigner had moved in and dared to stake a claim. The rule-book had been well and truly torn up, but, though the good old gorblimey days when you could leave your door open in the East End and villains 'only killed their own' were long gone, some things remained the same.

  They still loved their mums and they still loved an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned funeral: curly sandwiches and warm beer and well-worn tales of plod, porridge and pulling teeth for fun and profit. The brown moss was damp and springy underfoot as the cortege made its way towards the centre of the cemetery. The crowd had thinned out. Only close family, friends and certain police officers would be present at graveside. Thorne looked at these people with whom he had spent the best part of the day: sniffing through the moving tributes in the church; processing slowly through Finchley; muttering about how pleased Billy would have been with the turnout.

  Thorne had watched from inside the dark, unmarked Rover at the back of the line. He'd stared as pedestrians had bowed their heads or tipped their hats, unaware to whom they were showing respect. Thorne had found it funny. Respect was, after all, very important to a certain type of businessman.

  Those carrying Billy Ryan's body moved awkwardly along the narrow grove, struggling to retain the necessary degrees of dignity and balance as they stepped across gnarled roots and around leaning headstones. One of their number walked two steps ahead of the coffin to push aside overhanging branches. The mourners followed gingerly, in single file.

  Thorne was not the only police officer present. Tughan was a little way ahead of him, and a fair number of SO7 boys were knocking around somewhere. Thorne recognised plenty of other faces, too. These were a little harder, the eyes that bit colder. He wondered how many mourners were carrying weapons; how many years the pallbearers had done between them. He wondered whether the killer of Muslum and Hanya Izzigil might be the man next to him.

  It occurred to Thorne that, with the exception of the vicar and the blokes in the black hats, there were probably no men there without either a warrant card or a criminal record. Come to think of it, even the vicar looked dodgy.

  They rounded a corner and the track widened out towards a freshly prepared grave. A green cloth lay all around the hole, garish against the clay. It was a decent-sized plot, expensive, with room for a fitting memorial. More flowers were already laid out, waiting. There were a few recently filled graves here, among many that were far older, the gleaming black headstones and brightly coloured marble chippings incongruous next to the weathered stones. The epitaphs were gold-edged and vulgar alongside the faded names that belonged to another age: Maud, Florence, Septimus.

  The vicar spoke to begin the service:

  "Oh God."

  It pretty much summed up the way Thorne felt.

  On the far side of the grave Stephen Ryan was clutching his mother's arm. His eyes were bloodshot; whether from cocaine or grief, it was hard for Thorne to tell. The eyes flashed Thorne a look, intense and loaded, but impossible to read.

  Thank you for coming.

  What am I supposed to do now.?

  What the fuck do you think you're doing here.?

  Get ready.. Thorne looked from the son to the mother. Ryan's wife stared, unblinking, at the coffin. Thorne had not had the pleasure. He remembered something Tughan had told him, and if the rumours were to be believed, any number of gardeners and personal trainers certainly had. The botox and plastic tits had clearly been doing the trick, and now she'd have much more money to spend on keeping herself desirable. When she raised her eyes towards him and then higher to the trees beyond, Thorne could see that they were dark and dry beneath the heavy make-up.

  The vicar droned on, the occasional word lost to the caw of a crow or the rumble of a passing plane.

&nb
sp; Thorne wondered if Billy Ryan had kept those old boxing skills sharp by practising them on the second wife as well as the first. It was, he decided, highly probable. Either way, the fucker had finally been made to pay for everything he'd done to Alison Kelly. But had he really paid for Jessica Clarke?

  Thorne stared at the widow and the heir as the coffin was lowered into the grave. He couldn't be sure, but Ryan's wife looked like she just wanted to be certain he was never coming out. Stephen began to sob, and Thorne realised that he'd been holding on to his mother for support, not vice versa.

  When various armed robbers began stepping forward to sprinkle dirt on to the coffin lid, Thorne decided it was about time to move in the opposite direction. He turned and walked slowly back along the rough, narrow track towards the main avenue. As he did, he read the headstones, in the same way that it was impossible not to look through a lighted window as you wandered along a street. Many of those resident beneath his feet seemed to have 'fallen asleep', which struck him now as always as childish and silly. But it was perhaps understandable that there were nearly as many euphemisms here as there were bodies. "Passed into rest' and 'gone to a better place' were, even Thorne had to admit, marginally more acceptable than 'hit by a truck' or 'fallen down a lift shaft'. Certainly better than 'knifed several times in his hallway, then again in his kitchen'. Thorne emerged on to the wide road that ran down to the cemetery gates.

  He stopped by the hearse to rub the muzzle of one of the horses. A shiver ran down the animal's flank before it whinnied, and released a series of turds which splattered on to the tarmac. One bad memory well and truly exorcised.

  Moving along the line of cars, Thorne walked past a number of serious-looking characters in long black coats, many of whom he knew to have written best-selling true-crime memoirs. They were doubtless greatly honoured to be policing Billy's service. Security, along with a healthy smattering of soap stars and minor sporting figures, was a prerequisite of the traditional gangland funeral. Thorne stopped next to a large, metal litter-bin. It was overflowing with plastic bags, plant pots and dead flowers. Leaning against it was someone he hadn't expected to see. "Is there really any point you being here?" Thorne asked.

  Ian Clarke was clutching a large wreath of white lilies. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue jacket over a brown polo shirt. He clearly found Thorne's question highly amusing. "No point whatsoever," he said. "I went to Kevin Kelly's funeral, too. It was the least I could do."

  Thorne found himself wondering if Clarke could possibly know about Ryan's part in what had happened to his daughter. He dismissed the thought, wondered instead if he should tell him. That idea was sent packing even quicker. If he hadn't opened his mouth once already, they wouldn't be standing in a cemetery at all.

  He looked over towards the gatehouse. A gardener was moving slowly around the edge of a flower bed. One hand manoeuvred a strimmer, the other pressed a mobile phone to his ear.

  When Ian Clarke began to speak, it was so quietly, and with such an absence of emotion, that it took Thorne a few seconds before he realised that he wasn't talking to himself. Once he'd begun to listen, Thorne could tell that he might just as well have been.

  "It's the few days just after the burn that are the worst. Not just emotionally, but that's when all the real damage gets done, the peak damage. The progression of the injury can be ten times worse than the burn itself. Did you know that? That's what really causes the scarring.

  "She couldn't open her eyes or her mouth after it happened. She couldn't bite. The screaming came out through her teeth, like a sound I'd never heard before. Like a noise that was bleeding out through what was left of her skin. There was a lot of screaming in those first few days."

  "She had to wear a mask, a clear mask to keep a steady pressure on the damaged skin. It's basically to reduce the final height of the scars. To keep them supple. Over a year she wore that hideous bloody thing. Over a year, she wore it and hated it for twenty-three hours a day. Pointless in the end, though, because it hadn't been fitted properly and the damage had already been done. She had to keep still, you see, utterly still, absolutely fucking motionless while they put Vaseline across her face, and then this jelly stuff. She couldn't move a muscle while it set. "I could have let them anaesthetise her. Should have done. I didn't want her to have another operation, though. You understand? She'd already had six skin grafts and twenty-five blood transfusions by then. Some of the junior doctors used to joke, you know? They used to say she spent more time in the bloody hospital than they did.

  "That mask I was talking about, the pressure mask, they do it all with lasers now, you know. They scan the face with these lasers and it's always a perfect fit. No doctors or parents to mess it up. The treatment of burns is so much better now than it was then. Everything's moved on. Now they use hyperbaric oxygen therapy to reduce the scarring in the early days. Amazing things, new techniques, new discoveries all the time: micro dermabrasion laser skin resurfacing, chemical peeling, you name it. There are sites I've got book marked on the computer at home, you know? Medical news groups chat rooms you can join. You can find just about anything on the Internet if you're interested enough, or nerdy enough, depending on how you want to look at it, and you've got the time. I'm quite the expert on all the new developments.

  "These are good days to get burned."

  "The grafts are amazing now, really amazing. Single-sheet grafts, that's what's really made the difference. Back in our day, they only did split-skin grafts. You understand what I'm saying? They took shavings from different areas and it was virtually impossible to stop it contracting. To stop the scar tissue tightening. Now, they've got artificial skin which they can use for temporary grafting. It's amazing stuff, you know? Made from shark skin and silicon. Back then...God, listen to me, talking as if it was a hundred bloody years ago...Back then, they used cadaver grafts. Just the name makes you go a bit funny, doesn't it? Skin harvested from the dead.

  "Skin from corpses. On my girl's neck. Lying across her face."

  "They can even grow skin in labs now. They can grow it. Skin that's as near as damn it the same as the stuff we were born with. It's as thick as human skin, that's the real step forward. They call it "immortal skin". "Immortal" because the cells never stop growing. Ever. Did you know that there's only one naturally occurring human cell in which immortality is considered normal? Do you want to guess?

  It's the cancer cell. .

  "Now, they've got immortal skin."

  Finally, he paused.

  Thorne took half a step towards him. "Ian .."

  "Bad guys have scars. Monsters and murderers in films and on TV. The Phantom of the fucking Opera and the Joker and Freddie Krueger."

  "Maybe we've moved on from that kind of rubbish, too," Thorne said. If Clarke heard what Thorne had said, he chose to ignore it. "It's like wearing a mask you can never take off," he said. "Jess wrote that in her diary."

  "I read it."

  Clarke looked up, his eyes bright, his voice suddenly cracked and raw.

  "What she said about the party? You remember what she wrote that last day, about the speech someone was going to make on her birthday? It was exactly what I was planning to do. Exactly. Even down to the crap jokes."

  Thorne found it hard to meet the man's gaze, as he had that day in the house off Wandsworth Common. He dropped his eyes slowly to the ground. Down past the fists that had tightened around the edge of the wreath, the knuckles white as the petals that had fallen at Ian Clarke's feet.

  TWENTY-THREE

  "I think you're an idiot, Tom."

  "Cheers. Thanks for that."

  "I think you're a fucking idiot."

  "Jesus, Carol."

  The shock of hearing Chamberlain swear not an everyday occurrence somehow softened the blow of the comment itself. Chamberlain's pithy character assassination simultaneously managed to kill the conversation stone dead; to thicken the space between them. After half a minute spent tearing up beer mats and avoiding eye contact,
Thorne held up his empty glass. Without fully shifting her gaze from the back of a stranger's head, Chamberlain nodded. She slid her empty wineglass across the table.

  Thorne walked across to the bar, ordered a pint of Guinness and a glass of red.

  They were in the Angel on St. Giles High Street. The pub, pleasantly tatty and old fashioned, stood on or around the site of a tavern which, several hundred years before, had been on the route from Newgate Prison to the gallows at Tyburn. The condemned man's final journey, which took him along what was now Oxford Street, involved stopping at the tavern for a last drink. The drink was given free, the joke being that the customer would pay for it 'on his way back'. Thorne handed over his ten-pound note, knowing that he wouldn't receive a great deal of change. The concept of free drinks certainly belonged in a bygone age, like smallpox or press-gangs. These days, you could crawl into a pub on your hands and knees with two minutes to live and you'd be lucky to find so much as a complimentary bowl of peanuts on the bar.

  Those who knew the history of the pub also knew that the custom for which it had once been famous had spawned the phrase so beloved of publicans and piss heads alike. Thorne walked back to the table, put down the drinks. "One for the road," he said. Chamberlain understood the reference. Her smile managed indulgence and disapproval at the same time. "Right, and we all know who's likely to be the one swinging, don't we?"

  Thorne's face, save for the moustache of froth, was a picture of innocence. "Do we? I can't see why." He could see perfectly well why, but felt like arguing about it. He was less certain about why he'd told Carol Chamberlain what he'd said to Alison Kelly in the first place. He'd actually decided to tell Chamberlain, to confide in her, well before this evening. Well before Alison had killed Billy Ryan even. So he could hardly blame the beer.. "The sex part I understand," she said.

  "Oh, good."

  "After all, you are a bloke."

  "Right. I'm a mindless brute in helpless thrall to my knob." Chamberlain reddened slightly. "You said it." The blush made Thorne smile. "I didn't tell her because I slept with her," he said.