The Burning Girl-4 (7 page)

"What happened to you last night?" Hendricks asked.

Thorne sighed. He'd completely forgotten to cal and tel Hendricks he'd be stopping over at his old man's. "I'l tel you later .. ."

"Is everything al right?"

"Yeah, fine .. . just my dad."

"Is he OK?"

"He's a pain in the arse .. ."

"I stayed up. You should have cal ed."

"Oh, that's sweet." It was Tughan's voice. The DCI was standing over the bodies of Muslum and Hanya Izzigil, a mock-sweet smile on his face. "No, real y, it's very touching that he's worried about you .. ."

Thorne was stil spitting blood ten minutes later when Hol and joined him on the pavement outside the shop.

"If ever there was an incentive to solve a case .. ."

"Right," Thorne said. "Get shot of the slippery bugger."

"Mind you, he had a point. It was touching .. ."

Thorne turned, ready to let off some steam, but the broad grin on

Hol and's face softened the scowl on his own. He let out a long, slow breath and leaned back against the shop window. "You look rough, Dave .. ."

Thorne had seen DC Dave Hol and do a lot of growing up in recent years, no more so than since his daughter had been born. The floppy blond hair had been cut shorter recently, which put a couple of years on him, and the lines around his eyes had added a few more. Thorne knew that very few coppers stayed fresh-faced for long. Those that did were lucky or lazy, and Hol and was neither of those things. He'd saved Thorne's life the year before, and the circumstances the dark, depraved intimacies which the pair of them had witnessed and experienced had rarely been talked about since the resulting court case.

"I'm utterly knackered," Hol and said.

Thorne looked at the gingerish stubble dotted across the pale and slightly sunken cheeks. Maybe the change in him was due to responsibility as much as experience. A few years ago, and particularly during his girlfriend's pregnancy, Hol and hadn't shown a great deal of either.

"Is it the baby?"

"Actual y, it's Sophie," Hol and said. "It's probably hormones or something, but she's at me three or four times a night demanding sex."

"What?"

"Of course it's the baby! Have you had a sense-of-humour bypass?"

"I didn't get a lot of sleep myself. I was staying at my dad's place."

"Sorry, I forgot. How's he doing?"

"I reckon he'l be the death of me before he manages to kil himself."

On the other side of the road, a smal crowd had gathered to stare at the comings and goings at Izzigil's video shop. The cafe from which Constable Terry had run to see what al the screaming was about had now become a convenient vantage-point. The owner was cheerful y scurrying around, serving coffee and pastries to those who wanted to sit outside and gawp.

Hol and took out a packet of ten Silk Cut. He scrounged a light from a woman walking past with a push chair

"How long's that been going on?" Thorne asked, nodding towards the cigarette. He hadn't smoked in a long time, but would stil happily have kil ed for one.

"Since the baby, I suppose. It was fags or heroin."

"Wel , you're in the right place for that...."

North of Finsbury Park, Green Lanes straightened into a strut of what had become known as the Harringay Ladder. Looking at the bustle around its shops and businesses at that moment, it was easy to see the area for what it was: one of the busiest and certainly one of the most racial y diverse areas of the city. Of course, that did not explain the presence of armed police on its streets. A fierce gun-battle in those same streets six months earlier had left three men dead, and shown the other side of the area only too clearly. Harringay was home to a number of gangs operating within the Turkish community. According to figures from the National Criminal Intel igence Service, they were in control of over three-quarters of the seventy tonnes of heroin that passed through London every year. They protected their investments fiercely.

"Does Tughan think it's about smack?"

Hol and wasn't listening. "Sorry .. .?"

Thorne pointed back to the shop. "The Izzigils. Does our gangland expert in there think this is a turf war?"

"Actual y, he thinks it's the Ryans."

"Eh?"

"He seems to think that this is a message from Bil y Ryan to who-ever's been knocking his boys off. A "declaration", he reckons."

"That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?" Thorne said. "What's he base that on?"

"No idea. He seems pretty convinced, though."

Thorne closed his eyes as smoke from Hol and's cigarette drifted across his face. "It makes sense on one level, I suppose."

"What?"

"The Ryans were always going to work out who was after them long before we did."

Thorne watched as two officers carrying body-bags moved towards the front door. Hendricks had obviously finished his preliminary examination. Thorne moved to fol ow the officers back inside, murmuring to Hol and as he passed: "Listen, the fact that Hendricks is staying at my place .. . Are people making cracks about it?"

Hol and was enjoying a long drag. He laughed so much that he began to choke.

Thorne had spent the last three years based at the Peel Centre in Hendon, and his familiarity with it, with Becke House in particular, had bred a good deal of contempt. The building a dun-coloured, three-storey blot on an already drab landscape had once housed dormitories for recruits. The beds had given way to open-plan incident rooms and suites of poky offices, but there were stil plenty of fresh faces to be spotted around the place, with the Metropolitan Police cadets now housed in another building within the same compound.

It always struck Thorne as strange that the Serious Crime Group should be based where it was, hand in glove with a cadet-training centre. He remembered arriving back late one afternoon, a year or so earlier, and bumping into a uniformed cadet as he turned from locking his car. He'd spent the previous few hours trying to explain to an old woman why her son-in-law had taken an axe to her daughter and grandchildren. The look on Thorne's face that day had stopped the cadet dead in his tracks, hacking off his cheery greeting mid-sentence and sending the blood rushing from his smooth cheeks .. .

The meeting was taking place in the office that Russel Brigstocke was reluctantly sharing with Nick Tughan. The SO7 Projects Team was based in a col ection of Portakabins at Barkingside, where Tughan and his team stil spent a fair amount of time, but since the joint operation had begun, there'd been something of a shake-up on the third floor of Becke House. Hol and and DC Andrew Stone now shared their office part time with two DCs from Serious and Organised Crime, leaving the third office to Thorne and DI Yvonne Kitson. The latter spent most of her time in the Incident Room, col ating information alongside office manager DS Samir Karim and their opposite numbers from SO7. So, more often than not, Thorne had his office, such as it was, to himself.

"Right," said Tughan. "Game on. I think we've got ourselves a war .. ."

Tughan's Irish accent could switch between syrupy and strident. Today, it went right through Thorne. He remembered the scrape of Gordon Rooker's chair across the floor of the visiting room at the Royal.

Tughan leaned against the desk in a vain effort to make his superiority appear casual. He held up a piece of paper inside a transparent plastic jacket. "This was found among the dead man's paperwork. There are photocopies for each of you."

Brigstocke and Kitson already had their copies. Hol and, Stone and Thorne moved forward and took theirs from the desk.

"This letter isn't dated," continued Tughan, 'but, according to the son, it was delivered by hand five or six weeks ago."

"Late Christmas present.. ." Stone said, looking for the laugh, a little too ful of himself, as usual.

Tughan ignored him, pressed on. "It's nothing we haven't seen before. Subtler than some I've come across lots of stuff about the dangers facing new businesses. But basical y it's a simple protection scheme. Only problem is they were moving in on someone who was already protected."

'"They"', Thorne said, 'being Bil y Ryan."

"To the best of my knowledge, yes."

"The "best of your knowledge"?"

Tughan smiled thinly and turned away from Thorne. "We're moving forward on the basis that this letter originated from the Ryan family, or from criminals closely associated with them."

Thorne let it go, but it stil bothered him. It wasn't like threatening letters were sent out on headed notepaper. How could Tughan be so sure that this one came from the Ryan family?

Thorne caught Brigstocke's eye, but the DCI did not al ow him to hold it for very long. Brigstocke's attitude to the entire SO7 operation basical y involved keeping his head down until they disappeared. Thorne had a lot of time for the man he was hard and principled, caught far too often between those above and below him but he stil had an irritating predilection for hedging his bets. At the same time, of course, Thorne was wel aware that his own refusal to do the same thing had often landed him in plenty of trouble .. .

Yvonne Kitson was less afraid than some to speak her mind. "It doesn't make a lot of sense," she said. "They send a threatening letter. They send the bul y boys round to chuck a bin through the window. Then they have the owners kil ed.}"

Hol and looked up from the letter. "Right, that's quite an escalation, sir."

"It's not complicated," Tughan said. His smile took him way over the line that separated informative from patronising. "This was a straightforward campaign of intimidation. It might wel have got nasty eventual y, but it wouldn't have gone as far as kil ing. Then the Ryans discovered that the video shop was protected by the same people responsible for the murder of Mickey Clayton and the others. The same people that are paying the X-Man."

"A bit coincidental, isn't it?" Hol and asked.

Tughan had been waiting for this. "I don't think so .. ."

"It was the letter," Thorne said. "That's what started everything."

"It was probably the letter." Tughan couldn't keep the irritation off his face at having his thunder stolen. "It doesn't real y matter now how it started .. ."

Thorne took Tughan's expression as his cue to get stuck in. "Whoever was protecting Izzigil's business took major offence at the Ryans trying to move in."

"Major offence?" Hol and said. "That's putting it bloody mildly. They've had four of Bil y Ryan's top men kil ed."

Brigstocke agreed: "Whatever happened to breaking somebody's legs?"

"It's about a lot more than territory now," Thorne said. "It probably always was. We're presuming they're Turks, right? Whoever's been hitting the Ryans .. ."

"We can't presume anything," Tughan said. "The fact that the video business was Turkish needn't be significant."

"It needn't be, no. But I stil think it is."

"We've heard nothing from the NCIS .. ."

"They're not infal ible. We're probably talking about somebody relatively new here. Maybe an offshoot of an existing gang."

"Granted, it's a Turkish area, but other groups might stil try their luck."

"They'd be idiots if they did .. ."

"The Ryans did."

"Right," Thorne said. "And look what they got for their trouble."

Tughan seemed to decide suddenly that a physical barrier between himself and Thorne might be a good idea. He moved behind the desk and slid into the chair. He looked at his computer, affecting an air of thoughtfulness, but, to Thorne, it seemed more like regrouping.

"We're assuming that on one side we've got the Ryans, right?" Thorne continued quickly before Tughan had a chance to pul him up: "If we assume that on the other side we've got an as yet unknown Turkish operation, it al starts to add up. If you're a ne wish gang, looking to establish yourself, you don't go up against the big Turkish gangs that have already got the area sewn up. Not if you want to be around in six months' time. You so much as start sniffing around one of those big heroin operations and they'l wipe you out, right?"

If anybody disagreed, they were keeping quiet about it.

"What makes more sense, if you're looking to make a splash, is to go up against somebody else completely. Somebody unconnected with local business or local territory. When that letter dropped on to the doormat in that video shop, somebody saw an opportunity to expand in a different direction altogether; to send out a message to the gangs around them without getting anybody's back up. This lot, whoever the hel they are, probably see the Ryans as a soft target."

Tughan had been typing something. He raised his eyes from his computer screen and smiled. "Somebody should tel Bil y Ryan that."

There wasn't a trace of a smile from Yvonne Kitson. "And the Izzigils .. ."

"So who are they?" Stone asked. "If we want to stop a war, we'l need to know who's up against who."

Tughan stabbed at a key, leaned back in his chair. "I think DI Thorne might wel be right when he suggests that we're dealing with a Turkish or possibly Kurdish group here. I'm liaising with the NCIS, specifical y the Heroin Intel igence Unit.. ."

Thorne shook his head. "I told you, I can't see that this is about heroin. This is about not shitting on your own doorstep."

"Is that a technical term?" Brigstocke asked. "I must have missed that seminar."

Thorne smiled. "I've seen a couple of Guy Ritchie films."

Tughan raised his voice a little, bridling slightly, as always, at any exchange that rose above the funereal. "I'm confident that we wil establish the identity of this gang quickly. We wil find something connecting them to the video rental business, or we might get a lead from Turkish community leaders in the area .. ."

"Only the ones with a death wish," Brigstocke said.

"One way or another, things are much clearer now than they were." Tughan brandished the letter whose implied threats had probably been the catalyst for at least six deaths. "We've made a real breakthrough today."

Thorne's mood blackened in an instant. He remembered the film of tears across a pair of dark eyes, red around the rims.