The Burning Girl-4 (31 page)

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 pal bearers had done between them.

He wondered whether the kil er 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 al 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 fil ed 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 tel . 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.

Thorne wondered if Bil y Ryan had kept those old boxing skil s sharp by practising them on the second wife as wel as the first. It was, he decided, highly probable. Either way, the fucker had final y been made to pay for everything he'd done to Alison Kel y.

But had he real y 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 'fal en asleep', which struck him now as always as childish and sil y. 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, marginal y more acceptable than 'hit by a truck' or 'fal en down a lift shaft'. Certainly better than 'knifed several times in his hal way, 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 wel 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-sel ing true-crime memoirs.

They were doubtless greatly honoured to be policing Bil y'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 real y 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 Kel y'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 tel 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 al .

He looked over towards the gatehouse. A gardener was moving slowly around the edge of a flower bed. One hand manoeuvred a st rimmer 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 tel that he might just as wel have been.

"It's the few days just after the burn that are the worst. Not just.. . emotional y, but that's when al 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 real y 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 basical y 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 stil , you see, utterly stil , absolutely fucking motionless while they put Vaseline across her face, and then this jel y 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 al 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 al 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 al the new developments.

"These are good days to get burned .. .

"The grafts are amazing now, real y amazing. Single-sheet grafts, that's what's real y 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 virtual y 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 cal it "immortal skin". "Immortal" because the cel s never stop growing. Ever. Did you know that there's only one natural y occurring human cel in which immortality is considered normal? Do you want to guess? It's the cancer cel .. .

"Now, they've got immortal skin .. ."

Final y, 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 fal en 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 kil 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 ful y 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 gal ows 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 smal pox 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 al 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 wel why, but felt like arguing about it. He was less certain about why he'd told Carol Chamberlain what he'd said to Alison Kel y in the first place. He'd actual y decided to tel Chamberlain, to confide in her, wel before this evening. Wel before Alison had kil ed Bil y Ryan even. So he could hardly blame the beer... "The sex part I understand,"

she said.

"Oh, good .. ."

"After al , you are a bloke."

"Right. I'm a mindless brute in helpless thral to my knob."

Chamberlain reddened slightly. "You said it."

The blush made Thorne smile. "I didn't tel her because I slept with her," he said.

"So why, then?" She answered the question herself. "Because you're an idiot."

"Let's not start that again .. ."

She shook her head, exasperated, and took a slug of red wine.

Thorne wondered if the things she'd seen, that she surely must have heard, had made Chamberlain blush back when she was on the force. Perhaps it was simply a reaction that suppressed itself in certain situations, like a bookmaker's pity or a whore's gag reflex. She was certainly a damn sight less worldly than she often pretended.

"You're pissed off because it wasn't you," Thorne said. "Because you had nothing to do with it."

"I'm pissed off because of a lot of things."

It didn't sound like an invitation to pry, or a wil ingness to share. Thorne held his tongue and waited to see where she wanted to go.

"You're right, though," she said. "I knew I could never play a part in bringing Ryan down. However much you indulged me .. ."

"Carol, I never .. ."

She silenced the protestation with the smal est movement of her hand. "Stil , knowing I wasn't going to be involved didn't stop me imagining certain .. . scenarios."