The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Listen, I wasn’t expecting a slap on the wrists, all 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-called ‘life sentences’ Thorne had seen doled out.

  ‘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 still vulnerable then, Gordon?’

  Rooker blinked, said nothing.

  ‘Still dangerous, though, apparently. Twenty years and still 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 knockbacks 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 counselling, 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 actually 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 colleagues–ex-colleagues–who insisted that they couldn’t remember certain cases. She was bemused by those who struggled to recall 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 recalled him telling her once that the faces he could never forget were those he’d never seen. The ones belonging to the killers 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 pull the Jessica Clarke files officially, to draw any attention to herself or to the case. Instead, she’d called 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 call…

  ‘I burned her…’

  It was still the face she pictured now, despite the two decades that had passed. She’d tried, since speaking to Thorne, to age the image mentally, 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 colleague 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 still 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 recall of him with the confidence she had in his guilt. It was an illogical, ridiculous collision 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 hill, away from the school.

  She clung to that memory now, her grip stronger since the call 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, thankfully, that doubt was dying. It had begun to shrivel from the moment she’d picked up the phone and made that call 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 still 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 all 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 pulled out of the car par
k 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 multichanger 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 generally be something from the early years of country music and something more contemporary–Hank Williams and Lyle Lovett were the bookends at the moment. Sandwiched between them would be a couple of compilations, sometimes a soundtrack, and usually an alt country out-fit 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 well 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 all the deities he didn’t believe in when their paths had finally 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 killings, the investigation with which Thorne and his team were supposed to cooperate. He was back giving Thorne grief. Worst of all, 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’ll 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 caller 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 pulling 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 finally fucked off beyond belief.

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

  The scorch mark rose up the wall behind the cooker and licked a foot or so across the ceiling. The patterned wallpaper 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 still the stench was disgusting.

  ‘No more fucking chip pans,’ Thorne said. ‘We get rid of all the pans, all 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 still, we should get someone to come and take the bloody thing away…’

  ‘I’ll get it organised,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Why don’t you let me?’

  ‘I’ll 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 well have missed his lunch. I think he’s been swearing at the Meals on Wheels woman.’

  ‘They don’t call it Meals on Wheels any more, Eileen.’

  ‘He called 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 worktops. Eileen folded her arms tight across her chest.

  ‘Who called the fire brigade?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘He did, eventually. 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 well that, some mornings, his father had trouble remembering what his shoes were for.

  ‘We really 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 virtually everything, and though she lived in Brighton, she still 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 called 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 all 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 well 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 called, 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.

  ‘Thanks for doing that,’ he said, finally.

  ‘We should at least talk about it,’ she said. ‘We could consider the options.’ She pointed towards the cooker. ‘We’ve been lucky, but maybe now’s the time to think about your dad going somewhere. We could get this place valued, at the very least…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m worried he might start going off; you know, getting lost. There was a thing on the radio about tagging. We could get one of those tags put on him and then at least if he did forget where he was…’

  ‘That’s what they do to juvenile offenders, Eileen. It’s what they put on bloody muggers.’ He moved past her and into the narrow hall. He glared at himself briefly in the hall mirror, then leaned on the door to the living room and stepped inside.

  Jim Thorne sat forward on a brown and battered armchair. He was hunched over a low coffee-table, strewn with the pieces of various radios he’d taken apart and was failing to put together again. He spoke without looking up.

  ‘I fancied chips,’ he said. He had more of an accent than Thorne. The voice was higher, and prone to a rattle.

  ‘There’s a perfectly good chippy at the end of the road, for Christ’s sake…’

  ‘It
’s not the same.’

  ‘You love the chips from that chippy.’

  ‘I wanted to cook ’em.’ He raised his head, gestured angrily with a thick piece of plastic. ‘I wanted to make my own fucking chips, all right?’

  Thorne bit his tongue. He walked slowly across to the armchair next to the fire and dropped into it.

  He wondered whether this was the point at which the disease moved officially from ‘mid’ to ‘late’ stage. Maybe it wasn’t defined by anything clinical at all. Maybe it was just the first time that the person with the disease almost killed themself…

  ‘Bollocks,’ his father said to nobody in particular.

  It had been a struggle up to now, no question, but they’d been managing. The practical difficulties with keys and with mail and with money; the disorientation over time and place; the obsession with trivia; the complete lack of judgement about what to wear, and when to wear it; the drugs for depression, for mood swings, for the verbally abusive behaviour. Still, his father hadn’t wandered away and fallen into a ditch yet. He hadn’t started knocking back bleach like it was lemonade. He hadn’t endangered himself. Until now…

  ‘You know you’re supposed to stay out of the kitchen,’ Thorne said.

  Then came the two words the old man seemed to say most often these days. His ‘catchphrase’ he called it, in his better moods. Two words spat out or dribbled, sobbed or screamed, but mostly mumbled, through teeth grinding together in frustration: ‘I forgot.’

  ‘I know, and you forgot to turn the cooker off. The rules are there for a good reason, you know? What happens if you forget that knives are sharp? Or that toasters and water aren’t meant to go together…?’

  His father looked up suddenly, excitement spreading across his face as he latched on to a thought. ‘More people die in their own homes than anywhere else,’ he said. ‘Nearly five thousand people a year die because of accidents in the home and garden. I read it. More in the living room than in the kitchen, as a matter of fact, which I thought was surprising.’

  ‘Dad…’ Thorne watched as concentration etched itself into his father’s features and he began to count off on his fingers and thumbs.