The Burning Girl-4 (5 page)

"There's no fairness to it," Rooker said. "Twenty years. Twenty years on fucking VP wings .. ."

Thorne tried not to smirk: Vulnerable Prisoners. "Are you stil vulnerable then, Gordon?"

Rooker blinked, said nothing.

"Stil dangerous, though, apparently. Twenty years and stil a Cat. B? You can't have been a very good boy."

"There have been a few incidents .. ."

"Never mind, eh? Almost done, aren't you?"

"Three months left until the twenty's up .. ."

Thorne leaned back, glanced to his right. The black woman caught his eye as she fished a crumpled tissue out of her handbag. He turned back to Rooker. "It's a coincidence, don't you reckon? This bloke turning up now, claiming responsibility."

Rooker shook his head. "I doubt it. This is the best possible time to get the attention, isn't it? When I'm coming up for release. For possible release. Mind you, if he thinks they're going to let me out, he's dafter than I thought."

"What is it, a DLP?"

Rooker nodded. Once the tariff was completed, the Discretionary Lifer Panel of the Parole Board could recommend release to the Home Secretary. The panel comprised a judge, a psychiatrist and one other professional connected to the case, a criminologist or a probation officer. The review, unlike normal parole procedure, involved an oral hearing, and the prisoner could bring along a lawyer, or a friend, to represent him.

"I've got no sodding chance," Rooker said. "I've already had a couple of knock backs in as many years." He looked at Thorne, as if expecting some sort of explanation or reassurance.

He received neither. "What have I got to do? I've been to counsel ing, I've gone on Christ knows how many courses .. ."

"Remorse is important, Gordon." The word seemed almost to knock Rooker back in his seat. Thorne leaned forward. "These people are big on that, for some mysterious reason. They like to see some victim empathy, you know? Some shred of understanding about what it is that you actual y did to your victim, to her family. Maybe they don't think you're sorry enough, Gordon. What do you reckon? Maybe that's the question they want answering. Where's the remorse?"

"I held up my hand to it, didn't I? I confessed."

"It's not the same thing."

The scrape of Rooker's chair as he pushed himself back from the table was enough to make Thorne wince. "Are we done?" Rooker asked.

Thorne eased his own chair back and looked again to his right, where the black woman was now sobbing, the tissue pressed against her mouth. He caught the eye of the man sitting opposite her.

The man looked back at Thorne like he wanted to rip his head off.

As promised, Tom Thorne had rung as soon as he'd left the prison. He'd told her briefly about his meeting with Rooker. She'd heard everything she'd hoped to hear, and yet the relief which Carol Chamberlain had expected was slow in coming.

She sat at her desk, in the makeshift office she and Jack had rigged up in the spare room the year before. It was less cluttered than it had been then, a lot of junk transferred to the top of the wardrobe and stuffed beneath the spare bed, box-files piled on top of what used to be a dressing-table. It was now used as a bedroom only once or twice a year when Jack's daughter from his first marriage made the effort to visit.

Jack shouted up to her from downstairs. "I'm making some tea, love. D'you want some?"

"Please."

Chamberlain could never understand those col eagues ex-col eagues who insisted that they couldn't remember certain cases. She was bemused by those who struggled to recal the names and faces of certain rapists and murderers; or their victims. Yes, you forgot a file number, or the colour of a particular vehicle, of course you did, but the people stayed with you.

They stayed with her at any rate.

And she knew that they stayed with Tom Thorne, too. She recal ed him tel ing her once that the faces he could never forget were those he'd never seen. The ones belonging to the kil ers he had never caught. The smug faces he imagined on those that had got away with it.

Perhaps those who claimed not to remember had developed some technique for forgetting; some trick of the trade. If so, she wished that she'd been a bit closer to some of them, spent a few more nights in curry houses or out on the piss. If she had, they might have passed the secret on to her.

For reasons she wasn't ready to admit to herself, she hadn't wanted to pul the Jessica Clarke files official y, to draw any attention to herself or to the case. Instead, she'd cal ed in a favour, gone down to the General Registry in Victoria, and taken a quick look while an old friend's back was turned. Within a few seconds of opening the first battered brown folder, she could see that she'd remembered Gordon Rooker perfectly. The face in the faded black-and-white ID photo was exactly as she'd been picturing it since the night when she'd received that first phone cal .. .

"I burned her .. ."

It was stil the face she pictured now, despite the two decades that had passed. She'd tried, since speaking to Thorne, to age the image mental y, to give it the white hair and lines that Thorne had described, but without any success.

She guessed this was the way memory worked .. .

A col eague on the Cold Case Unit, now a man in his early sixties, had worked on the Moors Murders case. He told her that when he thought about Hindley and Brady, he stil saw those infamous pictures of them, smug and sunken-eyed. He could never imagine the raddled old man and the smiling, mumsy brunette.

Bizarrely, Carol Chamberlain needed to remember Rooker's face. She equated this total recal of him with the confidence she had in his guilt. It was an il ogical, ridiculous col ision of ideas, and yet, to her, it made perfect sense. His face, the one she knew every inch of, was the face of the man she saw kneeling by the fence. His face, the one she remembered smiling across an interview room, was the face of the man she saw running away, exhilarated, down the hil , away from the school.

She clung to that memory now, her grip stronger since the cal from Thorne. Of course, there had been doubt, and she knew, from his question about Rooker at the station, that Thorne had sensed it. It had sprouted in the dark and pushed as she'd sat shivering. It had grown like a weed, forcing its way up through the cracks in a slab as she'd lain awake.

"I burned her .. ."

Now, thankful y, that doubt was dying. It had begun to shrivel from the moment she'd picked up the phone and made that cal to Thorne. Now Thorne had been to see Rooker and heard him confirm it. Heard him confess it, again .. .

There was relief, but it could never be complete, for while the remembrance of Rooker's face was oddly comforting, there was also the face of Jessica Clarke to consider.

Chamberlain had seen photos; snaps of a smiling teenager, pale skin and dark hair down past her shoulders. She could stil see the hands of the parents trembling as they lifted wooden picture frames from a sideboard, but the girl's face the smooth, perfect face she'd had before had been al too easy to forget.

She could hear Jack coming upstairs with the tea. She tried to blink the image away.

She always remembered Gordon Rooker exactly as he had been the first time she'd laid eyes on him. She was cursed to remember Jessica Clarke the same way.

At the end of the day, Thorne climbed into the BMW with a damn sight more enthusiasm than he'd had when getting into it eleven hours before. He pul ed out of the car park of the Peel Centre, and for the next few minutes drove on autopilot. Most of his attention was focused on the far more important task of choosing the right music. The car had a six-disc CD multi changer mounted in the boot, and Thorne relished the time he spent once a week rotating the discs, making sure his selections gave him a good choice, but also a decent balance.

There'd general y be something from the early years of country music and something more contemporary Hank Wil iams and Lyle Lovett were the bookends at the moment. Sandwiched between them would be a couple of compilations, sometimes a soundtrack, and usual y an alt country outfit he was getting into Lambchop maybe, or Calexico. And there was always a Cash album.

He scanned through the choices available. It was important that he make the right one, to carry him through the thirty-minute drive and deliver him home in a different mood. He needed to drift a little, to lose himself in the music and let at least some of the tension bleed away.

The problem was Tughan .. .

Half a mile shy of Hendon, Thorne had settled for Unchained. By the time Cash's vocal came in on "Sea of Heartbreak' and he was smacking his palms against the steering wheel, Thorne was starting to feel much better. As wel as it was possible to feel, given the current procedural set-up. The current personnel.. .

He drove east for a while, then cut south, crossing the North Circular and heading towards Golders Green.

Thorne had clashed with Nick Tughan on a case four years previously, and he'd thanked al the deities he didn't believe in when their paths had final y separated. While Thorne had been part of the new team established at the Serious Crime Group, Tughan had found other tits to get on at SO7. Now he was back as part of the investigation into the Ryan kil ings, the investigation with which Thorne and his team were supposed to cooperate. He was back giving Thorne grief. Worst of al , the slimy fucker was back as a DCI.

Though they hadn't set eyes on each other for four years, their relationship had picked up exactly where it had left off. It had been neatly encapsulated in their first, terse exchange in the Major Incident Room at Becke House:

"Thorne .. ."

"Tughan .. ."

"I'l settle for "Sir" or "Guv" .. ."

"What about "twat"?"

If an officer were to get physical, to throw a punch, for example, at another officer of equal or subordinate rank, things could get a tad sticky. If he were to throw that punch and break a nose, or maybe a cheekbone even if he just handed out a good, hard slap, to a superior officer a DCI, say he would be in a world of very deep shit. Thorne was thinking about just how unfair this was when his mobile began to ring.

He took a deep breath when he saw the name on the cal er ID.

"Tom .. .?" Auntie Eileen, his father's younger sister. "Listen, there's no need to panic .. ."

Thorne listened, glancing in the rear-view mirror, swerving across the road and pul ing up in a bus lane. He listened as buses and cabs drove around him, deaf to the swearing of the irate drivers, to the bark and bleat of their horns. He listened, feeling sick, then scared, and final y fucked off beyond belief.

He ended the cal , dragged the car through a U-turn, and accelerated north, back the way he'd come.

The scorch mark rose up the wal behind the cooker and licked a foot or so across the ceiling. The patterned wal paper had bubbled, then blistered, where the grease that had accumulated over the years had begun to cook the dried paste and plaster beneath. The windows in the kitchen were open, had been for several hours, but stil the stench was disgusting.

"No more fucking chip pans," Thorne said. "We get rid of al the pans, al the oil in the place."

Eileen looked rather shocked. Thorne thought it was his language but then realised when she spoke that it was more than that.

"We should disconnect the cooker] she said. "Better stil , we should get someone to come and take the bloody thing away .. ."

"I'l get it organised," Thorne said.

"Why don't you let me?"

"I'l sort it."

Eileen shrugged and sighed. "He knows he's not supposed to come in here."

"Maybe we should put a lock on the door in the meantime." Thorne began walking around the room, opening cupboards. "He was probably hungry .. ."

She nodded. "He might wel have missed his lunch. I think he's been swearing at the Meals on Wheels woman."

"They don't cal it Meals on Wheels any more, Eileen."

"He cal ed her a "fucking cow". Told her to "stick her hot-pot up her fat arse"." She was trying not to laugh, but once she saw Thorne giving in to it, she stopped bothering to try.

With the tension relieved, they both leaned back against work tops Eileen folded her arms tight across her chest.

"Who cal ed the fire brigade?" Thorne asked.

"He did, eventual y. Once he worked out that it was the smoke alarm going off, he hit the panic button. For a while, I don't think he could remember what the noise was."

Thorne let his head drop back, looked up at the ceiling. There was a spider's web of smoke-stained cracks around the light fitting. He knew very wel that, some mornings, his father had trouble remembering what his shoes were for.

"We real y need to think about doing something. Tom?"

Thorne looked across at her. For years, Eileen and his father had not been close, but since the Alzheimer's diagnosis two years earlier, she had been a tower of strength. She'd organised virtual y everything, and though she lived in Brighton, she stil managed to get up to his father's place in St. Albans more often than Thorne did from north London.

Thorne felt tired and a little light-headed, exhausted as always by the combination punches of gratitude and guilt.

"How come they cal ed you}' he asked.

"Your father gave one of the firemen my number, I think .. ."

Thorne raised his arms and his voice in mock-bewilderment. "My number's on al the contact sheets." He started looking in cupboards again. "Home and mobile."

"He can always remember my number, for some reason. It must be quite an easy one .. ."

"And why did it take you so long to ring? I could have got here wel before you."

Eileen walked across to him, let a hand drop on to his forearm. "He didn't want to worry you."

"He knew I'd be bloody furious with him, you mean."

"He didn't want to worry you, and then I didn't want to worry you. The fire was already out by the time they cal ed, anyway. I just thought I'd better get here first, tidy up a bit."

Thorne tried to shut the cupboard door, but it was wonky and refused to close properly, however hard he slammed it.