The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  ‘What we talked about a week ago,’ Thorne said, ‘it’s escalated.’

  Rooker looked, or tried to look, serious. ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I told you last time…’

  ‘I’ll forget the rubbish you told me last time and pretend we’re starting from scratch, OK? This has to be down to some fuckwit you’ve done time with, or somebody who’s written to you. You told me all about some of the letters you get, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So, any bright ideas, Gordon?’

  Rooker took three quick drags. He held the smoke in and let it out very slowly on a sigh. ‘I’ve got to have some sort of protection,’ he said.

  Thorne laughed. ‘What?’

  ‘Word got around after you were here last time…’

  Thorne shrugged. He’d obviously opted for privacy a little too late. ‘You’ve not exactly been popular for quite a while now, Gordon. Talking to a copper isn’t going to make much difference.’

  ‘You’d be surprised…’

  Chamberlain’s voice was quieter than when she’d spoken before, but the edge had sharpened. ‘If you’ve got something to say, Rooker, you’d best say it.’

  Another drag. ‘I want this parole. I really need it to go my way this time.’

  ‘And?’ Thorne stared blankly across the table at Rooker. ‘Not a lot we can do about that.’

  ‘Bollocks. It’s down to the Home Office. You can get it done if you want to.’

  ‘Why would we want to?’

  ‘I need a guarantee that I’m getting out…’

  ‘Don’t want much, do you?’

  ‘It’ll be worth it.’

  ‘Unless you’re telling us who Jack the Ripper was and where Lord Lucan and Shergar are holed up, I doubt we’d be interested.’

  Rooker didn’t seem to find that funny.

  ‘What about these letters?’ asked Chamberlain. ‘The phone calls. That’s what we’re here to talk about.’

  Rooker stared down at the ashtray.

  ‘Whoever’s doing this has been to my house…’

  ‘I want protection.’ Rooker looked up at Thorne. ‘After I’m out.’

  ‘Protection from who?’ Chamberlain said.

  ‘New identity, national insurance number, the lot…’

  ‘Billy Ryan,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Maybe…’

  ‘Is Billy Ryan going to come after you?’

  ‘Not for the reason you think.’

  ‘So why should we give a toss?’

  ‘I can give him to you.’

  Thorne blinked. This was interesting. This was far from tenuous. He avoided eye contact with Chamberlain, refused to show Rooker anything, kept his voice casual. ‘You’re going to grass up Billy Ryan?’

  Rooker nodded.

  ‘Grass up the Ryans,’ Chamberlain said, ‘and you really will be a target.’

  ‘That’s why I want protection.’

  It was a straightforward piece of gangland logic, and Thorne could see the sense of it. ‘Get Ryan before he gets you. That it?’

  ‘Don’t make out like you wouldn’t like to put him away. He’s a piece of shit and you know it.’

  ‘And you’re a fucking saint, are you, Gordon?’

  ‘It’s him or me, isn’t it? What would you do?’

  ‘After what you did at that school, what you did to that girl…I’m inclined to let Billy Ryan have you.’

  Rooker’s head dropped and stayed down as he stubbed out what was left of his cigarette. He ground the butt into the ashtray until there appeared to be nothing left of it at all. For a moment, Thorne wondered if he’d palmed it, like a magician. When Rooker finally looked up, the cockiness had gone. The lines in his face had deepened. He seemed suddenly tense. He looked like a frightened old man.

  ‘I didn’t burn the girl,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me.’

  Thorne saw Chamberlain’s hands clench into fists on the table, white across her knuckles as she spoke. ‘Don’t piss me about. Don’t you bloody dare piss me about…’

  Rooker licked his lips and repeated himself.

  And Thorne believed him. It really was that simple. All that struck him as odd was that Rooker seemed so reluctant, so hesitant about his denial. Surely things were arse about face. Thorne remembered how, a week before, the man sitting opposite him had admitted to setting a fourteen-year-old girl on fire as easily as he might own up to nicking lead off a roof. Now, he was taking it back, denying he’d had anything to do with it, and it was as if it were the hardest thing in the world.

  It was like he was confessing his innocence.

  Dave Holland and Andy Stone got along, but no more than that. A year or so ago, when they’d first begun working together, Holland had resented Stone’s easy charm, and bridled at his place as the young pretender–pretender to what he was never sure–feeling threatened. They’d kicked along well enough since then, though there were still times when the ease with which his fellow DC told a joke or wore a suit made him want to spit.

  ‘I feel like shit warmed up,’ Stone said.

  Holland looked up from the computer screen and smiled. ‘Caning it again last night, were you?’

  ‘Still sweating Carlsberg and Sea Breezes.’

  Holland raised an eyebrow. ‘Cocktails?’

  ‘I was with a very classy lady, mate…’

  Holland was at least self-aware enough to admit that now, with a baby to think about, his resentment had distilled into plain, old-fashioned jealousy.

  ‘I bet I still had more sleep than you, though,’ Stone said.

  ‘Right…’

  Holland had more or less grown used to the physical fatigue. He could happily nod off at pretty much any time, and was not beyond catnapping in the Gents’ after a really bad night. It was mentally that he was still finding things tough. There was a fuzziness about his thinking these days, a reluctance to go in any direction other than the path of least resistance. There was a time, back before the baby and the rough patch they went through even before that, when Sophie would badger him about being the kind of straightforward, head-down, career copper that his old man had been. She didn’t have to bother these days, and she knew it. Holland didn’t have the mental energy to do a great deal else.

  And there was the way the baby made him feel: the sheer, fucking size of the love and the terror. Looking down at her sometimes, he could feel his heart swell and his sphincter tighten at the same time.

  Holland closed his eyes for a few seconds. He could remember so vividly the first time he’d walked into a CID suite. He could recall virtually every moment of that first case he’d worked on with Tom Thorne. He saw in perfect detail the clothes he’d been wearing on a particular occasion in Thorne’s car, or in the office when they got a break in the case. It was only the excitement of it, which he knew had been intense, that seemed suddenly distant and hard to imagine…

  ‘Where’s that plum from SO7, anyway?’ asked Stone. ‘He’s never here when he’s needed, is he?’

  They were going through the paperwork and computer data relating to what had quickly emerged as the less than legitimate business activities of Muslum Izzigil’s video shop. When one or two members of Brigstocke’s team had expressed surprise that video piracy was still big business, they had been subjected to Tughan at his most patronising: ‘Five thousand copies from one stolen master tape, knocked out at a couple of quid a pop. You might be looking at half a million per year per film. It’s not quite up there with heroin, but there’s a damn sight less risk and you don’t tend to get put away for so long.’

  Some, notably Thorne, had remained sceptical. Then again, Thorne was sceptical about everything that came out of Tughan’s mouth, and there was certainly evidence that pointed towards a sophisticated smuggling operation. There was no such evidence leading them to whoever was running it; whoever Muslum Izzigil–among many others in all likelihood–had been fronting for; whoever had reacted so aggressive
ly when Billy Ryan had tried to muscle in on their territory.

  Whoever was paying the X-Man…

  There was a DC from SO7 who, theoretically at least, was supposed to be working with Holland and Stone, but whenever there were paper-trails to slog through, urgent meetings would materialise back at Barkingside, or mysterious sources would suddenly need chasing up on the other side of London.

  ‘They’re taking the piss, aren’t they?’

  Holland found it hard to disagree with Stone’s assessment. He was about to chip in with a comment of his own when something on the screen caught his eye. He stared at it for a few seconds, scrolled back to check something else, then held up a hand, beckoning Stone from the other side of the room. ‘Come and look at this, Andy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A name.’ He highlighted two words on the screen for Stone to look at, moved to a different page and highlighted the same words again. Stone stared down at the screen from behind his shoulder. ‘Just a name,’ Holland said. ‘Nothing to tie it to anything dodgy, as yet.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be. These fuckers are too clever for that.’

  ‘Maybe…’

  ‘Definitely. We won’t catch ’em with Windows 2000, I can tell you that.’

  Holland grunted. ‘Well, whoever they are, their name just keeps cropping up…’

  ‘I was a dead man,’ Rooker said.

  Chamberlain leaned back in her chair, waiting. Thorne moved in the opposite direction. ‘Don’t get existential on us, Gordon. Keep it simple and keep it honest. All right?’

  ‘I was fucked, all right? That simple enough? Whoever did the girl made it look like me. I was known for stuff like that, wasn’t I? For using lighter fuel…’

  ‘ “Whoever did the girl”. I take it you can’t tell us who that was?’

  ‘I can tell you who paid for it. I can tell you whose idea it was to kill a kid.’

  ‘We knew that. We knew it was one of the other firms who…’

  ‘You knew fuck all.’

  Next to him, Chamberlain sat stock still, but Thorne could feel the tension radiating off her. He asked the question slowly: ‘So, who was it then?’

  This was Rooker’s big moment. ‘It was Billy Ryan. That’s why I can give him to you. Billy Ryan put the contract out on Kevin Kelly’s little girl.’

  A pause, but nothing too dramatic before Thorne asked the obvious question: ‘Why?’

  ‘It wasn’t complicated. He was ambitious. He wanted to take on the smaller firms, but Kelly wouldn’t have it. He thought things were fine as they were. Billy reckoned Kevin was losing his edge.’

  ‘So he tried to take over?’

  ‘Billy wanted what Kevin had. More than Kevin had. He’d tried to get him out of the way earlier but fucked it up.’

  Thorne remembered Chamberlain’s gangland history lesson: the failed attempt on Kevin Kelly’s life a few months before the incident at the school. ‘Were you anything to do with that, Gordon?’

  ‘I’m not getting into anything else. Point is, the Kelly family thought I was.’

  ‘So, Billy targets his boss’s daughter, but whoever he’s paying tries to kill the wrong girl.’

  ‘Yeah, that got fucked up as well, but it still worked. Kevin Kelly goes mental, wipes out anybody who’s so much as looked at him funny, then hands the whole fucking business over to Billy Ryan and walks away. It couldn’t have gone better.’

  Thorne saw Rooker flinch slightly when Chamberlain spoke. ‘I’m not sure Jessica Clarke or her family would have seen things in quite the same way.’

  ‘How come you know any of this?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Because Billy Ryan asked me to do it, didn’t he? I was the perfect person to ask. I’d done a bit of freelance stuff for one or two people, a few frighteners and what have you…’

  ‘You’re telling us that Ryan offered you money to kill Kevin Kelly’s daughter.’

  ‘A lot of money…’

  ‘And you turned the job down.’

  ‘Fuck, yes. I don’t hurt kids.’

  Chamberlain groaned. ‘Jesus, this stuff makes me sick. It always comes down to this “noble gangster” bollocks. “We only hurt our own”, and “it was only business”, and “anybody who touches kids should be strung up”. He’ll be telling us how much he loves his mum in a minute…’

  Rooker laughed, winked at her.

  The room wasn’t warm, and up to this point Thorne had kept his leather jacket on. Now he stood and dropped it across the back of his chair. Chamberlain stayed where she was. Thorne guessed that her smart, grey business suit was new. He thought she might have had her hair done as well, cut a little shorter and highlighted, but he’d said nothing.

  ‘I hope this isn’t an obvious question,’ Thorne said. ‘But why did you confess?’

  ‘Billy Ryan made sure that every face in London thought I’d done it. I was well stitched up. That lighter they found by the fence was left there deliberately.’ He looked at Chamberlain. ‘You saw what Kevin Kelly did to the people he guessed were responsible. Imagine what he’d have done to me. I had Kelly after me for what he thought I’d tried to do to his Alison, and Billy after my blood because I was the only person who knew who’d really set it all up.’ He turned back to Thorne. ‘ I was a marked man.’

  ‘So, prison was a preferable option, was it?’

  Rooker took the lid off his tobacco tin. He put the cigarette together without looking down, and spoke as if he were trying to explain the mysteries of calculus. ‘I thought about running, pissing off to Spain or further, but the idea of spending years looking over my shoulder, shitting myself every time the doorbell went…’

  Chamberlain shook her head. She glanced at Thorne and then looked back to Rooker. ‘I’m not buying this. You’d be just as much of a marked man in prison.’

  Rooker put down his half-finished roll-up. ‘Do you think I didn’t know that?’ He reached down and gathered up the bottom of the bib and the sweatshirt underneath, then hoisted them up above sagging, hairy nipples to reveal a jagged scar running across his ribs. ‘See? I was a marked man from the moment I walked into Gartree, and Belmarsh, and this place…’

  ‘So why not just take your chances outside?’

  ‘It’s on my terms in here. I’m not scared of it.’ He pulled down the sweatshirt, smoothed the bib across his belly. ‘On the outside it could be anyone who’s on a big pay-day to take you out. It’s the bloke who wants to know the time. The bloke taking a piss next to you, asking you for a light, whatever. In here, I know who it’s going to be. I can see it coming and I can protect myself. I’ve had a couple of scrapes, but I’m still breathing. That’s how I know I did the right thing.’

  Thorne watched Rooker’s yellow tongue snake out and moisten the edge of the Rizla. He rolled the cigarette, slid it between his lips and lit up. ‘You did the right thing by Billy Ryan as well. You never grassed him up.’

  ‘I wasn’t a complete fucking idiot.’

  Chamberlain drummed her fingers on the table. ‘That “honour among thieves” shite again.’

  ‘So why now?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Listen, it was you who came to see me, remember. Started me thinking about this. Started people round here whispering.’

  ‘Why now, Rooker?’

  Rooker removed the cigarette from his mouth, held it between a nicotine-stained finger and thumb. ‘I’ve had enough. I’m breathing, but the air tastes of stale sweat and other men’s shit. I’m arguing with rapists and perverts about whose turn it is to change channel or play fucking pool next. I’ve got a grandson who’s signing forms with West Ham in a few weeks. I’d like to see him play.’ He blinked slowly, took a drag, flicked away the ash. ‘It’s time.’

  Chamberlain stood up and moved towards the door. ‘That’s all very moving, and I’m sure it’s just the kind of stuff the parole board loves to hear.’

  Rooker stretched. ‘Not so far, it isn’t. That’s why I need a bit of help…’

  �
��I still don’t see why you confessed to the attempted murder of Jessica Clarke. You could have got yourself safely banged up by putting yourself in the frame for any number of things. That security manager you tied to a chair and set light to, for instance. Why claim that you tried to kill a fourteen-year-old girl?’

  Thorne had the answer. ‘Because you’re less of a marked man on a VP wing. Right, Gordon? You’re harder to get at.’

  Rooker stared, and smoked.

  There was a knock, and the prison officer put his head round the door, offered tea. Thorne accepted gracefully and Chamberlain declined. The officer bristled a little at Rooker’s request for a cup but disappeared quietly enough at the nod from Thorne.

  ‘So, who was it?’ Chamberlain said.

  Thorne knew that she was thinking about the letters, about the calls, about the man she’d thought was smiling up at her from her front garden.

  ‘If it wasn’t you who took Billy Ryan’s money, you must have some idea who did.’

  Rooker shook his head. ‘Look, I haven’t got a clue who this nutter is who’s been pestering you…’

  ‘Who burned Jessica Clarke?’ Chamberlain asked.

  ‘I haven’t got the faintest, and that’s the truth. I don’t know anyone who would have done it. Who could have. Over the years, I’ve started to wonder if maybe it was Billy himself…’

  They sat in the car for a minute, saying nothing. When Thorne leaned forward to turn the key, Chamberlain suddenly spoke.

  ‘What did you make of all that?’

  Thorne glanced at her, exhaled loudly. ‘Where do you want to start?’

  ‘How about with Rooker getting himself put away for something he didn’t do?’