The Burning Girl-4 (16 page)

"Check what you like," Rooker said. "I can't help you. I tel you what, though: if it is the bloke who did it, who real y did it, we both know who can give you his name."

The smal room was strangely half lit. The curtains had been drawn against the dazzling sunshine, filtering it through thin, brown and orange nylon. A dirty amber light moved across the pale wal s, softening the metal ic gleam of the dressing-trol ey and the drip-stand.

"Tel me about Alun Fisher," Thorne said.

With what few teeth were left in his upper jaw, Rooker bit down hard on his bottom lip. "He's nothing. A fucking little tosspot.. ."

Thorne heard the prison officer chuckle quietly and glanced across. It wasn't clear whether it was Rooker or his book that he was finding so funny.

"A little tosspot with a smack habit.. ."

Thorne could see where it was going. "And a drug debt, right?"

"A fucking big one. Three guesses who he owes the money to .. ."

"So Fisher just walks up to you in the middle of a class?" Hol and said. "Stabs you, just like that, while you're doing your Rolf Harris bit?"

"I thought you could see it coming," Thorne said. "That's what you told me last time. If someone was going to have a pop at you, you'd know about it.. ."

Rooker sniffed, cast his eyes to the right. "Wel , somebody looked the other fucking way, didn't they? Took their eye off the bal . These teachers in the Education Department don't get paid much, do they? Or maybe a screw fancied a new car, a holiday for the wife and kids .. ."

If the prison officer was upset, he wasn't showing it. Park Royal was already carrying out an inquiry into exactly what had gone wrong, while Alun Fisher sat in a segregation cel waiting to see what they were going to do with him. Having fucked up and left Gordon Rooker breathing, he was probably more worried about what Bil y Ryan was going to do. He might suddenly find that his debt had increased in al sorts of ways.

"So are you going to press charges?" Hol and asked.

"Not much point, is there? They'l move Fisher to another prison. Might as wel try to get through the rest of the time without any hassle."

"Up to you," Thorne said.

Rooker moved his hand and began scratching the top of his leg. The prison officer raised his head, waited a few seconds, then yanked the hand back down to the mattress.

"What you were saying about checking my friends," Rooker said. "How long is al this going to take? The sooner they get everything sorted out, you know, and arranged, the quicker we can start talking. Right? This has been going on too long already .. ."

Thorne knew what Rooker meant, realised that he was reluctant to talk specifical y about protection, and evidence, and Ryan, with the prison officer in the room.

"It won't be a quick decision," Thorne said. "They've only been considering the position seriously for the last couple of days."

Rooker shook his head. "Right. That's typical. Maybe, if they'd considered it a bit earlier, I might not have had a fucking paintbrush jammed in my guts .. ."

Thorne knew that was probably his fault. He looked at the indignant expression plastered across Rooker's yel owish chops. He could remember feeling guiltier. From the corner of his eye, he saw the prison officer look up when Hol and's mobile rang. The DC checked the cal er ID, stood up and took the phone out of earshot to answer it.

"You're supposed to turn those off in here," Rooker said. "They can interfere with medical equipment, you know. Fuck up the machines .. ."

The prison officer spoke for the first time: "Shame you're not wired up to a couple then. Might have done us al a favour."

Thorne couldn't help smiling. "How long's he going to be here for?"

"We'l get him shifted back to the health care wing tomorrow, with a bit of luck," the officer said. "It's a level-three unit. They've got al the facilities, al the medication for any infection or what have you .. ."

Rooker looked less than delighted, but it made sense. The prison would want him back as soon as possible. The officers would be wanted back where they could be of more use, and the hospital would be glad to get shot of any patient who needed guards.

Thorne heard the single, short tone as Hol and ended the cal and turned to ask him. "What?"

"That was DCI Tughan. He wants me to give you a message. You're not going to like it.. ."

"Fuck.. ."

Thorne could guess what the message would be. They must have turned down Rooker's offer. There hadn't been enough time for it to get up as high as it needed to go. It must have been blocked at a lower level. It would be interesting to find out exactly where .. .

Thorne stood and pul ed on his jacket. "It's not looking too promising, Gordon."

He saw the prison officer smirk, and return to his book.

Thorne managed to make it through to the end of the day without having it out with Nick Tughan. He lost himself in a pile of unread memos, Police Federation junk mail and case updates from investigations he'd been working on before this one.

He then spent an evening in front of the TV without cal ing Tughan at home.

By lunchtime on Friday, just when he thought he'd given up on the idea, he found himself cornering Tughan in the Incident Room, spoiling for a fight. Sam Karim, who had been talking to Tughan when Thorne had marched over, made himself scarce pretty bloody quickly. Tughan leaned across a desk, flicking through the Murder Investigation Manual that seemed to have become his Bible.

"Answer in there, is it?" Thorne asked.

Tughan glanced up. "What do you want, Tom?"

Thorne wasn't 100 per cent sure. "Why didn't they go for it?"

"Al the obvious reasons."

"Such as?"

"Oh, come on. Russel and I raised a number of concerns when you first brought it to our attention. When you eventual y brought it to our attention .. ."

It was clear to Thorne that Tughan was as riled up as ever. "This was a genuine chance to get Ryan for something and make it stick."

"Right. On the word of a man who confessed to it twenty years ago, and who suddenly decides to change his story .. ."

"Ryan is panicking. He's seriously fucking rattled. Why else would he try to get Gordon Rooker out of the way after al this time?"

Tughan went back to the manual. He licked a finger and began to flick through the pages. He was trying to slow things down, to put a foot on the bal . "Securing the release of a potential y dangerous prisoner is not something to be undertaken if there is any room for doubt."

"He'd be released into our custody, for fuck's sake."

"The last thing we need is a compensation case for wrongful imprisonment."

"How could Rooker claim compensation for that? He confessed!

Tughan looked at him as if he were an idiot. "If a decent lawyer gets a sniff of what's going on, that confession might suddenly turn out to have been al but beaten out of him .. ."

"These are just excuses."

Tughan turned over another page.

"You're just pissed off because I came up with a way to nail Bil y Ryan."

"I think you should get back to work .. ."

"Same thing with the idea that it was Ryan who kil ed Moloney. Is anybody actual y pursuing that line of inquiry?"

The colour began to rise above Tughan's button-down col ar. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Ryan had the perfect cover. He knew exactly what the X-Man did to his other victims. His men found two of the bodies, for fuck's sake."

"I know al this .. ."

"Al he had to do was make sure that whoever kil ed Moloney used the same type of gun and carved the X. It was a piece of piss .. ."

"We're looking into it."

Thorne snorted. "Right, but not too hard. Because it came from me."

Tughan slammed the manual shut. It sounded as though he was trying hard to keep his voice down. "Me again. There's over fifty officers working on this case .. ."

"Don't give me that fucking "team player" speech." Thorne leaned forward, gripped the edge of the desk. "It's al wel and good as long as you're the captain of the team. That's the truth."

"I'm not going to stand here and listen to this." Tughan picked up the manual and waved it angrily at Thorne. "Who do you think you're talking to?"

Thorne stepped back from the desk, laughing in spite of his anger. "What? Are you going to throw the book at me?"

For a few seconds, Tughan glared. Then, he dropped his eyes, gave a smile some room on his face. He opened the manual again and leafed through it until he found the page he was looking for. "Maybe just a bit of it," he said. Tughan snatched up a pen, dragged it hard across the page, and tore it out. He hesitated for just a second before stepping forward and pressing it hard against Thorne's chest. "Something to think about."

Thorne grabbed at the torn-out sheet while Tughan stamped out of the room. Tughan had underscored one section hard enough to go through the paper .. .

"The modern-day approach to murder recognises the fact that there is no longer the place for the "lone entrepreneur" investigating officer."

Hendricks was working late. For the second night in a row, Thorne sat alone in front of the TV, trying to regain some equilibrium. It rankled that Tughan was choosing to ignore perfectly sound ideas, but, more than anything, Thorne couldn't cope with the idea that Ryan was going to get away with it. Yes, Tughan might nail him one day for drugs of fences or fraud, or bloody tax evasion. Who knew, perhaps even the Zarifs would get him?

But he wouldn't have paid for Jessica Clarke .. .

Thorne brooded for most of the evening, then shouted at a TV chef for a while until the sourness began to dissipate and he started to feel better. Fuck it, February was almost over and spring was around the corner. He was thinking about maybe picking up his dad, driving down to Eileen's place in Brighton for the weekend, when the phone rang.

"Are you watching ITV?" Chamberlain asked.

"I was going to cal you. The Rooker thing's a non-starter .. ."

"Put it on," she demanded.

Thorne reached for the remote, changed the channel and turned up the volume.

A female reporter was talking straight to camera. Thorne watched, not clear what he was supposed to be seeing, until the camera cut away from the reporter and the story was told in a series of related shots .. .

An empty playground. A group of schoolgirls gathered at a bus stop. A can of lighter fluid.

Thorne felt his guts jump.

"He tried to do it again," Carol Chamberlain said. "He tried to burn another girl."

MARCH

THE WEIGHT OF THE SOUL

TWELVE

Thorne pul ed up outside the house and sat for five minutes. It felt like the longest pause for breath he'd taken in a while. The time had passed in a flurry of activity, mindless and otherwise: seven days between the attempt to kil one young girl, and this, a visit to the father of another who had died almost twenty years earlier.

Seven days during which the powers-that-be had quickly changed their minds about Gordon Rooker's offer .. .

Thorne waited until the engine had ticked down to silence and it had begun to get cold in the car before he got out and walked towards the house. It was in the centre of a simple Victorian terrace on the south side of Wandsworth Common, not far from the prison. Thorne rang the bel and took a couple of steps back down the path. There were lights on in most of the houses: people settling down to eat, or getting ready for a Friday night out. The place would probably fetch around half a mil ion. It was certainly worth much more now than it had been fifteen years ago, when the Clarkes had moved back here from Amersham. Back from where Jessica had gone to school.

The man who answered the door nodded knowingly while Thorne was stil reaching into a pocket for his warrant card. "Don't bother," he said, stepping away from the door. His voice was thin, and a little nasal. "What else would you be?"

Ian Clarke had been on the phone within an hour of that first news report. He'd sounded angry and confused. He'd insisted on being told the details, had demanded to know exactly what was being done. Thorne sensed that he'd calmed down a little during the week that had fol owed.

"Thanks for coming. There might be some tea on the way, with a bit of luck.. ."

"That'd be great.. ."

"We've got some Earl Grey, I think .. ."

"Monkey tea's fine."

The tea delivered, Mrs. Clarke announced that she had work to do. She smiled nervously as she stepped out of the room. She was wearing what, to Thorne, seemed like the look people gave to seriously il patients before closing doors behind them in hospitals.

"Emma runs her own catering business," Clarke said. He pointed towards the ceiling. "She's got a smal office at the top of the house."

"Right. What about your daughter?"

There was the shortest of awkward pauses before Clarke responded. "Isobel?"

Thorne nodded. The second daughter.

"Oh, she's around somewhere."

Clarke had split from his first wife in 1989, three years after Jessica's death and almost immediately after they'd moved back to London from Buckinghamshire.

Thorne had seen it plenty of times with bereaved parents. It was often impossible to deal with the guilt and the anger and the blame. Impossible to look into the eyes of a husband or wife and not see the face of a lost child.

"No more news, then?" Clarke asked. He ran a hand across his skul . He'd lost a fair amount of hair and cut the remaining grey brutal y short. It emphasised the chisel ed features and lively, blue eyes that belied his age. Thorne knew that he had to be in his early fifties at least, but he looked maybe ten years younger.

Thorne shook his head. "Only the same stuff rehashed to sel a few more papers. None of it's coming from us, I'm afraid."

"Witnesses? Descriptions? It was a busy street, for God's sake."

"Nothing's changed since I last spoke to you on the phone. I'm sorry."

"I know I don't real y have a right to be told anything at al . I'm grateful.. ."