The Burning Girl-4 (25 page)

Tan Zarif spoke up for the first time. "We'l 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 swal ow 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 real y was Alison Kel y, 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 actual y burning, seemed tiny, dancing in her friend's eyes in that second before he'd turned and run. He stil remembered how smal they had seemed, flickering against the dark brown. How far away.

As he'd rushed away down that steep hil , careering towards the car, that scream had fol owed him. He could feel the echo of it at his back, rol ing down the hil side after him, al but knocking him off his feet as he went. Then the screams had grown, of course, louder and more hysterical, pushing him downhil even faster.

He'd stood stil 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 flames had stil 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 kil .

SEVENTEEN

"How did you get my number, anyway?" Thorne asked.

Alison Kel y 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 stil 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 al 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, Bil y 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 private-school accent and a pony. Now, I'm a slightly better-paid legal secretary with less of an accent and no pony. And I'm stil out of it. But.. ."

"But?

She grinned, picked up her drink. "I've stil got a few friends who are very much in it." She drained her glass. "We'l have a girls' night out a couple of times a year. You know the kind of thing family-run restaurant, shed-loads of booze on the house, I complain about work and they complain about how long their husbands and boyfriends are getting sent down for."

"Sounds like a fun evening .. ."

"One or two of them may or may not know certain police officers pretty wel and can cal in a favour if they're asked nicely. Getting a copper's phone number is hardly rocket science."

"I should be shocked," Thorne said, 'but I'm too busy thinking about another round."

She picked up Thorne's empty glass and pushed back her chair. "Another one of those .. .?"

For the next hour or so they talked about the difficulties of doing, or not doing, what was expected of you. It was soon obvious that this was something they both knew a great deal about.

Thorne told her that if he were the sort to do what was expected, or at the very least encouraged, he wouldn't be there drinking with her.

Alison told Thorne about her reluctance to do bugger al and sit on her arse spending her old man's money. She told him about upsetting her mother by refusing the offer to set her up in a business.

"Sounds like you were trying to distance yourself," Thorne said. "From the money. From everything that made the money. Like you blamed it for what happened to Jessica."

Her pale complexion flushed a little. "If my dad hadn't been who he was, what he was, then it wouldn't have happened. That's not a delusion .. ."

They both took a drink to fil the short pause that fol owed. By now, she'd moved on to white wine. Thorne had moved on to his next Guinness.

"Why did you marry Bil y Ryan?" he asked.

She thought about it for a few seconds. Just rising above the buzz and burble of pub chat, the voices of the latest boy-band drifted through from the jukebox in the bar next door.

"It sounds like I'm joking," she said, 'but it real y did seem like a good idea at the time."

"He must have been .. . what? Mid-thirties?"

"Older. And I was only eighteen."

"So who the hel thought that was a "good idea"?"

She smiled. "Not my mum, for a start. She thought the age difference was too big. But Dad was al for it. I think there were a few people who thought it was a good thing, you know, some of the old boys who'd been around a bit. Even though Dad had been out of it a few years by then, and Bil y was running the show, some people thought it was a good way of... building bridges, or something. The old guard and the new guard."

"You make it sound like it was arranged."

She shook her head. "I wish I had that as an excuse. I'd like to say I married him to make everybody else happy. And I knew that I was, to some extent. But the simple fact is that I loved him." She paused, but looked as if she needed to say something else. She searched for the right words. "He was impressive, back then."

Thorne thought about the Bil y Ryan he'd so recently encountered. There would be some who might stil describe him as impressive, but lovable was not a word that sprang to mind.

"What went wrong?"

She took a good-sized slurp of wine. "Nothing ... for a while. But there were two sides to Bil y."

Thorne nodded. He didn't know many people without at least a couple .. .

"There was part of him', she said, 'that just wanted to have fun. He liked to have friends over or go out to parties. He used to take me into al the clubs. He wanted to dress up and show off and hang around with actors and pop stars. People writing books. He loved al that.. ."

"I bet the actors and pop stars loved it as wel ."

"When it was just the two of us, though, he could be a whole lot different. If it was just him and me and a bottle of something, he became somebody else, and I was on the receiving end.

Maybe he was stil having fun, I don't know .. ."

Thorne saw her eyes darken and knew what she meant. He remembered the feet, dainty inside highly polished shoes, but also Ryan's shoulders, powerful beneath the expensive blazer.

Two sides. The dancer and the boxer.

"It's a pretty good reason to leave someone," he said.

"He was the one who left."

"Right.. ."

"He said he couldn't cope with the problems I had. Al the stuff with Jess I was stil trying to deal with."

Thorne had to fight to stop his mouth dropping open. Problems? Stuff? Al of them, al of it, the result of what her husband had done.

Alison saw the look on Thorne's face, took it as no more than mild surprise. "I did have some bloody awful mood swings, I know I did. Bil y wasn't exactly what you'd cal supportive, though. He kept saying I was neurotic .. . that I needed help. He kept tel ing me that I hated myself, that I was impossible to live with, that I needed to get over what had happened when I was in that playground."

When a man paid by Bil y Ryan had come to her school to kil her. When flames had devoured her best friend in front of her eyes.

"No," Thorne said. "Not exactly supportive."

She swirled around the last of her wine in the bottom of the glass. "He was right about me needing help, of course, but I needed a damn sight more after a couple of years with Bil y. I got through a bit of that money my mum had been offering then. Pissed a lot of it away paying strangers to listen. Any number of the buggers at fifty quid an hour."

Thorne stared at her.

Her eyes widened when they met his. "I'm al right now, though," she said.

"That's good .. ."

As she downed her drink, she contorted her face into a series of deliberately comical twitches and tics. It wasn't particularly funny, but Thorne laughed anyway.

She put down the glass and reached for her handbag. "Let's go and get something to eat.. ."

Rooker stared at a spider on the ceiling, wishing things were noisier. It was always noisy in prison, always. Even asleep, five hundred men could make a shitload of noise. During the day, it could be unbearable. The pounding of feet in corridors and on stairs, the clank of metal -buckets and keys, the slash and smash of voices echoing from cel to cel , from landing to landing. Even a tiny noise a fork on a plate, a groan in the night was magnified somehow and charged. It was like the anger floating around the place had done something to the air itself, made it easier for sound to move through it and carry. Distorted, deafening. It was something you got used to. It was something Rooker had got used to.

Here, though, it was like the bloody grave.

Even the relative peace of the VP wings he'd been on was like a cacophony compared to this. There, the shuffling nonces made noises al of their own. Same thing went for the old fuckers they got lumbered with. They always stuck the very old fel as on the VP wings. The stroke victims and the doolal y ones, and the ones who had problems getting around. They were no trouble, most of them, but, Christ, once the lights went out, the hawking and the coughing would start, and he'd want to put pil ows over al their pasty, lopsided faces.

He missed it now though. The silence was keeping him awake.

He al owed himself a smile. There would be plenty of noise in a few weeks when he was out when it was al over and he was home, wherever that would be. There would be silence when he wanted it, and noises he hadn't heard in a very long time. Traffic, pubs, footbal crowds.

When it was al over .. .

The sessions with Thorne and the rest were wearing him out. Thorne especial y had a way of digging at him, of pushing and pushing, until the effort of remembering and repeating it over and over again was like shovel ing shit uphil . He knew it had to be done, that it would be worth it, but he'd forgotten quite how much he hated them. Even when you were supposed to be helping them, when you were supposed to be on the same side, the police were a pack of mongrels.

He felt a familiar flutter in his gut that was coming often now, whenever he thought about life on the outside. It was like a bubbling panic. He'd imagined being out for so long and now that it was within his reach he realised that it scared the living shit out of him. He'd known plenty of cons who'd done a lot less time than him and couldn't hack it on the outside. Most were fucked up on booze and drugs within a year. Others al but begged to be sent back to prison, and, eventual y, they made sure they got what they wanted.

It wasn't going to be easy, he knew that, but at least with Ryan out of the way he would have a chance. He would have the time to adjust.

If he ever felt a moment's doubt, wondered about changing his mind and tel ing Thorne and the rest to stuff it, he just had to remember that night in Epping Forest, one of the last times he'd ever clapped eyes on Ryan. He just had to remember the look on Ryan's face.

Getting out scared him, but Bil y Ryan scared him more.

Rooker turned on to his side to face the wal , wincing at the jolt of pain in his bel y. It was stil sore. On balance, he preferred the pain to the panic, but stil , he decided that once he'd got out and away, once he'd let the dust settle, he'd do some ringing round. He'd cal in a favour or two and get that shit bag Fisher sorted out.

Thorne looked across at the clock on his bedside table. 5.10 a.m. Only ten minutes later than the last time he'd looked.

He turned and watched Alison Kel y sleep.