The Burning Girl-4 (4 page)

On the screen above him, Austin Powers was dancing to a Madonna song as Izzigil came slowly around the counter and walked towards the front of the shop. He pressed himself against the window and looked both ways along the street.

"Muslum .. .?"

Izzigil turned at his wife's voice and took a step back into the shop. He saw her eyes suddenly widen and her mouth drop open, and he turned back just as the black shape rushed towards the window. Just as the world seemed to explode with noise and pain and a terrible waterfal of glass.

They walked slowly back along Buckingham Palace Road, towards the station. It was the middle of the lunch hour, and people were queuing out of the doors of delis and coffee-shops.

February was starting to bite and Thorne's jacket was zipped up to the top, his hands thrust right down into the pockets.

"How's Jack doing?"

Chamberlain stopped for a second to let a girl dart across the pavement in front of her. "He's the same." They moved off again. "He tries to be supportive, but he didn't real y want me to go back to it. I know he worries that I'm taking on too much, but I was going mental stuck in the house." She looked at herself in a shop window, ran fingers through her hair. "I couldn't give a shit about gardening .. ."

"I meant about these phone cal s. That letter."

"He doesn't know about the letter and he slept through al but one of the cal s. I told him it was a wrong number." She pul ed the scarf she was wearing tighter around her throat. "Now. I'm more or less hovering over the bloody phone al night long. It's almost worse on the nights when he doesn't ring."

"You're not sleeping at al ? It's been going on for a bloody fortnight, Carol.. ."

"I catch up in the day. I never slept much in the first place."

"What's he sound like?" Thorne asked.

She answered quickly and simply. Thorne guessed that she'd known the questions he would ask, because they were the ones she would have asked.

"He's very calm. Like he's tel ing me things that are obvious. Like he's reminding me of things I've forgotten .. ."

"Accent?"

She shook her head.

"Any thoughts as to his age?"

She carried on shaking it.

"Look, I know this is going to sound strange, but I'm not sure why you didn't just cal the police."

She started to speak, but Thorne stopped her.

"I mean the local lads. This is just some nutter, Carol. It's a kid pissing you about. It's someone who's read some poxy true-crime book and hasn't got anything better to do."

"He knows things, Tom. Things that never came out. He knows about the lighter that was dropped at the scene, which brand of fuel was used .. ."

"It's someone Rooker spent time with inside, then. Rooker's told him to wind you up when he's got out."

She shook her head. "There's no reason for Rooker to send anyone after me. He confessed, remember. Anyway, Rooker bloody wel liked me."

"He had a relationship with you. You were the one who interviewed him. Which is why you 're the one being targeted now, and not whoever the SIO was."

"I think it's just because I'm next in line. The DCI on the case left the force wel before I did. He emigrated to New Zealand ten years ago. He'd be a damn sight harder to track down than I was."

It made sense, but Thorne had one other suggestion. "Or maybe, whoever it is knows that you were .. . affected by what happened to Jessica."

She looked up at him, concerned. "How would anyone know that? How do you know .. .?"

They walked on in silence for fifty yards or so before Thorne spoke again. "Are you worried that you put the wrong man away, Carol? Is that what this is about?"

"No, it isn't. Gordon Rooker burned Jessica Clarke. I know he did."

They didn't speak again until they reached the station.

Halfway across the concourse she stopped and turned to him. "There's no need to bother waiting. I've got quarter of an hour until the next train back."

"It's fine. I don't mind."

"Get back to work. I like to potter about a bit anyway. I'l buy a magazine, get myself sorted. I'm a fussy old bat like that."

"You're not fussy."

She leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. "Cheeky sod."

Thorne sighed and broke their embrace. "I don't quite know what you expect me to do about this, Carol. There's nothing I can do official y that anybody else couldn't."

"I don't want you to do anything official y."

He saw then, despite the light-hearted tone and the banter of a few moments before, just how rattled she real y was. The very last thing she wanted was to let the powers-that-be see it, too. He couldn't believe that they'd take her off the Cold Case Unit, but there were plenty who thought the Met should not be using people who'd be better off queuing up in the post office.

"Right," Thorne said eventual y. "But it's OK for me to waste my time."

Chamberlain pul ed a large handbag on to her smal shoulder and turned on her heels. "Something like that.. ."

Thorne watched her disappear inside WH Smith.

Walking back towards the underground, he thought about scars that you hid, and those that you showed off. Scars bad enough to make you jump off a car-park.

THREE

These rooms always had one thing in common. The size might vary, the style was usual y governed by age, and the decor was dependent on the whim of budgets or the inclination of the top brass. But they invariably had the same smel . Chrome and tinted glass or flaking orange plasterboard. Freezing or overheated. Intimate or anything but. Whatever the place was like, that smel would tel you where you were with a sack over your head. Thorne could sniff it up and name its constituent parts like a connoisseur: stale cigarette smoke, sweat and desperation.

He looked around. This one had a bit of everything a fresh coat of magnolia, the fumes charged up by the heat coming off radiators a foot thick. There was a snazzy new system of coloured chairs. Blue for visitors, red for inmates .. .

Most chairs were occupied, but a few red ones remained vacant. A black woman in the next row but one glanced across at him. The seat opposite her was empty. She smiled nervously, her eyes crinkling behind thick glasses, and then looked away before Thorne had a chance to smile back. He watched the woman beam as a young man her son, Thorne guessed swaggered towards her. The man grinned, then checked himself slightly, looked around to see if anyone had noticed him drop his guard.

Thorne checked his watch: just before ten. He needed to get this over with as quickly as possible and get back to the office. He'd cal ed DC Dave Hol and earlier, on his way west across London, towards HMP Park Royal ... "I need you to cover for me," he'd said. "Tel Tughan I'm off seeing a snout, or that I'm fol owing up a hunch, or whatever. You know, some

"copper" bol ocks .. ."

"Do I get to know what you're real y doing?"

"I'm doing someone a favour. I should be back by lunchtime if the traffic's al right, so .. ."

"Are you driving} When did you get the car back?"

Thorne knew what was coming. He was stupid to have let it slip. "I got it back late yesterday," he'd said.

The car in question, a pulsar-yel ow BMW, was thirty years old, and Thorne had parted with a good deal of money for it the year before. Thorne thought it was a classic. Others preferred the term 'antique'. Hol and, in particular, never missed an opportunity to take the piss, having maintained from the moment he'd seen it that the car was a big mistake. He'd gone to town when it had spectacularly failed its MOT and disappeared into the garage a fortnight earlier.

"How much?" Hol and had asked, gleeful.

Thorne had cursed as he'd caught a red light. He'd yanked up the hand brake "It's an old car, al right? The parts are expensive." Not only were they expensive, but there seemed to be a great many of them. Thorne couldn't remember them al , but he could recal the growing feeling of despair as they were cheerful y reeled off to him. For al Thorne knew about what was going on under the bonnet, the mechanic might just as wel have been speaking Serbo-Croat.

"Five hundred?" Hol and had said. "More?"

"Listen, she's old, but she's stil gorgeous. Like one of those actresses that's knocking on, but stil tasty, you know?" As the car was a BMW, Thorne had tried to come up with a German actress who would fit the bil . He had failed. Felicity Kendal, he'd said as he pul ed away from the lights. Yeah, that'l do.

"She?" Hol and had sounded hugely amused.

"She's like Felicity Kendal."

"People who cal their car "she" are one step away from a pair of string-back driving gloves and a pipe .. ."

At the noise of the chair opposite him being scraped backwards, Thorne looked up and saw Gordon Rooker dropping on to the red seat. Thorne had never seen a picture, or been given a description, but there was no mistaking him.

"Anyone sitting here?" asked Rooker, a gold tooth evident as he smiled.

He was sixty, give or take a year or two, and tal . His face was thin and freshly shaved. The skin hung, leathery and loose, from his neck, and a ful head of white hair had yel owed above the forehead with a lifetime's fags.

Thorne nodded towards the green bib that Rooker wore, that al the prisoners wore on top of the regulation blue sweatshirts. "Very fetching," he said.

"We've al got to wear these now," Rooker said. "A few places have had them for ages, but a lot of governors, including the one here, thought they were demeaning to the prisoners, which is al very splendid and progressive of them. Then a lifer in Gartree swaps places with his twin brother when nobody's looking and walks out through the front door. So, now it has to be obvious who's the prisoner and who isn't, and we al have to dress like prize prats when we have visitors. You think I'm making this up, don't you?"

The voice was expressive and lively. The voice of a pub philosopher or comedian, nicely weathered by decades on forty rol -ups a day. While Rooker was speaking, Thorne had taken out his warrant card. He slid it across the table. Rooker didn't bother to look at it.

"What do you want, Mr. Thorne?" He held up a hand. "No, don't bother, let's just have a natter. I'm sure you'l get round to it eventual y."

"I'm a friend of Carol Chamberlain."

Rooker narrowed his eyes.

"She'd've been Carol Manley when you knew her .. ."

The gold tooth came slowly into view again. "Did that woman ever make commissioner? I always reckoned she had it in her."

Thorne shook his head. "She was a DCI when she retired. That was seven or eight years ago."

"She was a decent sort, you know?" Rooker looked away, remembering something. His eyes slid back to Thorne. "I'm not surprised she got married; she was a good-looking woman.

Stil fit, is she? Is she a game old bird?" He leaned across the table. "Do you like 'em a bit older?"

Whether the suggestive comments were an attempt to unsettle or to bond, Thorne ignored them. "She's being bothered. Some lunatic is sending letters and making cal s .. ."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Whoever he is, he claims to be the person responsible for the attempted murder of Jessica Clarke." Thorne looked hard at Rooker, studied his face for a reaction. "He reckons he was the one who burned her, Gordon."

There was a reaction, no question, but Thorne had no idea what Rooker was so amused about.

"Funny?" Thorne asked.

"Pretty funny, yeah. Like I said, I'm sorry about Miss Manley, or whatever she's cal ed now, being bothered, but it's a laugh when you get your own personal nutter, isn't it? It's taken him long enough, mind you, whoever he is .. ."

"You're tel ing me you don't know who this person is?"

Rooker turned up his palms, tucked them behind his bib. "Not a fucking clue."

If he'd been asked at that instant to put money on whether Rooker

3.A

was tel ing the truth, Thorne would happily have stumped up a few quid.

"I've had plenty of letters over the years," Rooker continued, grinning. "You know, the ones in green ink where they've pressed so hard that the pen's gone through the paper. People who want me to tel them stuff, so they can have a wank over it or whatever. I've had a few mad women and what have you, writing steamy letters, saying they want to marry me .. ."

A case the year before when Thorne had first encountered Carol Chamberlain had begun with just that sort of letter. It had not been genuine, but plenty were, and Thorne never ceased to be amazed, and sickened, by them. "Wel , Gordon, you're obviously quite a catch."

"But this is different, right? This is sort of like a stalker in reverse. He can't stalk me, so he's stalking somebody else, somebody who was involved in it al , and he's pretending to be me.

Pretending he did what I did .. ."

Thorne decided it was time to stop pissing about. "So he is pretending then, is he? Because that's basical y why I'm here. To make sure."

The cockiness, the ease, melted slowly back into the lines of Rooker's face. The shoulders drooped forward. The voice was low and level. Matter of fact.. .

"You can be sure. I set fire to that girl. That's basical y why I'm here."

For half a minute, Thorne watched Rooker stare down at the table-top. His scalp was visible, pink and flaking beneath the white hair. "Like you said, though. He's waited a long time, this nutter. Why have you been here so long, Gordon?"

The animation returned. "Ask the fucking judge. Miserable arse-hole's dead by now, if there's any justice." He laughed, humourlessly, at his own joke. "Like he'd know justice if it bit him in the bol ocks."

"It was a high-profile case," Thorne said. "You were always going to get sent down for a long one."

"Listen, I wasn't expecting a slap on the wrists, al right? Look at what some of these bastards get away with now, though. Blokes who've carved up their wives are getting out after ten years. Less sometimes .. ."

Without an ounce of sympathy, knowing that he deserved every second he spent banged up, Thorne could nevertheless understand the point that Rooker was making. The twenty-year tariff or 'relevant part of the sentence' he'd been handed was more than twice many so-cal ed 'life sentences' Thorne had seen doled out.