The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  He watched the steam drifting from beneath the iron like the breath of funeral horses. He listened to the scrape of the handcuffs against the metal rail as Brookhouse strained against his bonds.

  ‘Get a towel under him,’ Chamberlain said. ‘When there’s contact he’ll probably piss himself…’

  Thorne was not sure if this was a simple practicality or a last attempt to scare Brookhouse into talking. He looked into Chamberlain’s eyes and knew one thing: if he didn’t talk, she was going to press a hot iron on to his chest.

  Brookhouse said nothing.

  The iron moved towards the scarlet skin in slow motion…

  Chamberlain had obviously reached the point where she thought she had nothing left to lose. Thorne watched her about to torture a man, and tried to decide if what he had was worth holding on to.

  There was scarcely any air between metal and flesh…

  Thorne knew that the sound and the smell of it could be no more than a moment away. He tried to speak, but once more he’d become as his father was. The words ‘no’ and ‘stop’ refused to come. He heard the hairs on Brookhouse’s chest begin to crackle. He put out a hand.

  ‘Carol…’

  Brookhouse screamed hard and sucked in his chest, then screamed louder still as the mattress pushed him back up again, into the steaming base of the iron.

  Chamberlain moved as if hers was the skin kissed by hot metal, and when she and Thorne had finished shouting, they could only stand still, pale and stiff as corpses, looking away while Brookhouse sobbed and spat bubbles of nonsense.

  ‘Ba…ba…’

  Thorne listened to Brookhouse’s gibberish. He watched him kick a leg, slowly, as Holland’s baby had done.

  ‘Ba…ba…ba…’

  Thorne looked across the bed at Chamberlain. He was unable to tell if the horror on her face was at what she had done with the iron or at something she could see stuck to the flat of it.

  It was perhaps an hour after Wayne Brookhouse had gone. The two of them were sitting in darkness, unable to drink fast enough–when the word suddenly danced into Thorne’s head.

  ‘What are we going to do about Rooker?’ Chamberlain asked. ‘With what that fucker did to Jessica? We can’t let him come out…’

  Thorne wasn’t paying much attention. He was trying to place a word, recalling precisely where he’d seen it on a page. No, on a screen…

  Brookhouse had not been talking nonsense at all.

  Thorne had seen the word a month or so before on the NCIS website. On a night when he’d been unable to sleep, when he’d sat at his computer and absorbed the miserable realities of human trafficking. That same night he’d trawled through pages of information about organised crime in the UK and in Turkey. He’d speed-read dense blocks of text about the set-up of Turkish gangs, the customs and the hierarchies of the most powerful families in Ankara and Istanbul…

  A word that looked to English eyes as though it should mean baby or child and meant exactly the opposite.

  ‘Tom? What about Rooker…?’

  Baba…

  Thorne felt it where the hairline brushed the nape of his neck. He knew that Gordon Rooker was not the only person he’d misjudged.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Thorne waited nearly a week before going back to Green Lanes.

  He’d spent the days at work, going through the motions–pushing paper around his desk as one case wound down and others moved up a gear. All the time he was weighing up everything he’d learned about what had been done and who should pay for it, and waiting in vain for something that might change the most depressing fact of all. There was nothing he could do…

  It was just after eleven-thirty on a warmish Thursday night. The café had not been closed very long when Thorne pressed his face against the glass in the door. He could just make out Arkan Zarif alone at a booth towards the back. He could see Zarif’s daughter Sema moving back and forth behind the counter.

  Thorne banged on the glass.

  Zarif looked up, peered to see who it was. From outside, Thorne couldn’t read the expression on the old man’s face when he recognised who was at the door. Zarif nodded towards his daughter and the girl came from behind the counter, unlocked the door and held it open for Thorne without a word.

  The main lights in the place had been turned off, but a number of the lanterns overhead were glowing: orange and red bleeding through coloured glass and slats in metal. There was music playing at a low level, a woman singing in Turkish. Thorne couldn’t tell if she was in love or in despair.

  Zarif held up his glass, shouted something to his daughter as Thorne approached his table. Thorne turned to the girl and shook his head. She moved back behind the rows of cups and glasses.

  ‘No wine?’ Zarif said. ‘Coffee then…?’

  Thorne slid into the booth without answering.

  For a few moments they studied each other, then Zarif emptied his wineglass. His hand seemed huge around the stem. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another.

  ‘Merhaba, Baba,’ Thorne said. Hello…

  Zarif smiled and raised his glass. ‘Merhaba…’

  ‘We sat in here once and talked about what names meant, remember?’

  Zarif said nothing.

  ‘We joked about how they can mean more than one thing. Like the word baba…’

  ‘The meaning of this word is simple,’ Zarif said.

  ‘I know what it means, and I also know how it’s used. I know the respect that it inspires back in Turkey. And the fear.’

  ‘Baba is “father”, that’s all.’

  ‘Father as in “head of the family”, right? Father to your children, and to your friends, and to those who earn you money. Father to those who kill for you and father to those who you wouldn’t think twice about having killed if it suited you.’

  ‘I look after my wife and children…’

  ‘Of course you do. You’re just running a small family business while others are out with the guns and knives you put into their hands. How does it work, Baba? You run things until you croak or you’re past it and then the boys take over?’

  Zarif swilled wine around his mouth, then swallowed. ‘When business no longer interests me, I will retire. Now, things are still interesting. It’s a good arrangement…’

  ‘It’s a great arrangement. Memet and his brothers front it up, handle all the attention from the likes of me, while you’re just the harmless old boy in the kitchen, chucking meat on the grill.’

  Zarif folded his hands across his gut. He was wearing the same grubby, striped apron Thorne had seen the first time he’d come into the café. ‘These days, I truly enjoy the cooking more than…other parts of my business. It’s easy to be at the heart of things here. I’m in the kitchen, people know where I am.’

  It struck Thorne suddenly that Zarif’s accent was less pronounced than when they’d spoken before. There was little, if any, groping for the right word. The act had been dropped.

  Sema Zarif stepped from behind the counter and walked past them. She glanced at Thorne as she moved towards the stairs, and for the first time Thorne caught the trace of a smile. As if he were no longer someone to be worried about…

  ‘You must have thought I was such a fucking idiot,’ Thorne said. ‘Sitting at your table, eating with you…’

  ‘Not at all. If you want to feel better, you must know that you are a man far from the one I took you to be.’

  The white parts of Zarif’s thick moustache were stained red with wine. Thorne stared at it, thinking that it looked like Zarif had been feasting on something raw; wishing that he’d said yes to a drink; wanting to know what the hell Zarif was talking about.

  ‘A man who would torture to get what he wants,’ Zarif said. ‘The performance with the hot iron was…remarkable.’

  Thorne felt something clench beneath his breastbone. ‘When did you speak to Wayne Brookhouse?’ he asked.

  Zarif raised his glass to his mouth, answered quietly across the top of
it. ‘It was several days ago, I think…’

  When Brookhouse had left Thorne’s flat, in the early hours of the previous Friday morning, the goodbyes had been less than fulsome. Chamberlain had said nothing as Thorne had untied him. The two of them had stood and watched without a word as he’d rushed, swearing and stumbling, towards the door. Only at the last moment had Thorne taken Brookhouse to one side, held him against the back of the door and tried to press some good advice upon him.

  ‘Don’t go back,’ he’d said. It had been hard to make himself understood, to be sure his words were being heard and taken seriously, but Thorne knew that he had to make the effort. ‘Are you listening, Wayne? Go home, pack a bag and make yourself very fucking scarce…’

  Thorne watched as Zarif took another sip of wine. Wayne Brookhouse had not been nearly as clever as he’d thought he was. He’d made the decision to go back to Zarif and tell him what had happened, and Thorne knew that he almost certainly hadn’t received the sympathy or the respect he thought he deserved. Thorne could imagine Brookhouse showing Zarif the burn on his chest, cursing those responsible and assuring his boss that he’d done what was expected, that he’d said nothing.

  Thorne could imagine the artfully faked concern on the Baba’s face, the stone-cold resolve as he’d made the only decision possible.

  ‘Where is he now?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘I haven’t seen Wayne for a day or two. He’s gone away, maybe.’

  ‘If a body turns up, you know I’ll be back.’

  ‘It won’t turn up.’ Zarif made no effort to hide the smile or to disguise the double-meaning. He knew that he was safe, and seeing that knowledge smeared across his fat face was like a blade sliding back and forth across Thorne’s chest. He said nothing and tried again to convince himself that he’d done the right thing. If not the right thing, then the only thing he could have done.

  He felt sure that even if he’d done the sensible thing a week earlier–if he’d asked Wayne Brookhouse to drive his taxi to the nearest police station–it would have made no difference. Brookhouse would have said nothing. Zarif’s lawyers would have had him back picking up customers within a few hours. The police would have been left with nothing but a few awkward questions to throw at Gordon Rooker, and even less to link the Zarif family to anything worth talking about.

  Even if Thorne were to come clean now–if he were to go to Brigstocke or Tughan or Jesmond and tell him what he knew and how he knew it–there would be little to gain. He could admit to torturing a witness and with his next breath explain that the witness had now disappeared; that the witness was, in all likelihood, dead and buried. The only person on the end of any awkward questions after that would be Thorne himself.

  And he’d been asking himself plenty of those already.

  ‘Mr Rooker was released yesterday, so I understand.’

  ‘You know he was…’

  ‘This was a surprise.’ Zarif raised his thick grey eyebrows. ‘Knowing that he told you a number of lies, you still chose to let him out of prison.’

  Thorne tried hard to draw some spit up into his dry mouth. ‘I chose not to take the steps that might keep him there…’

  I chose not to reveal what I’d discovered. I chose not to tell anyone that I’d kidnapped a suspect, that I’d held him against his will and done nothing as this information was forced from him with extreme violence. I chose not to reveal the extent of Gordon Rooker’s brutality, or of my own.

  I chose to keep the truth quiet and to protect myself…

  ‘I wonder what Rooker is doing?’ Zarif asked.

  ‘If he’s got any sense, he’ll be watching his back. You’re not fond of leaving loose ends lying around, are you?’

  Zarif looked genuinely hurt. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Rooker has nothing to fear from me. We had an agreement, we had shared interests.’

  ‘Right. He helps you deal with Billy Ryan and in return you look after him once he’s out. What are we talking? Money, I presume. Protection? Something above and beyond what we can provide…’

  ‘An agreement, which I fully intend to honour.’

  Thorne ran his hand along the surface of the table, scraped salt into the palm of his hand. ‘Honour, right. That’s important, isn’t it? I remember you touching glasses with me and drinking to it. How much honour was there for Marcus Moloney? Sliced up and shot in the head in his car.’ He dropped the salt on to the floor. ‘Was that an honourable way to die, do you think?’

  ‘Did he behave honourably?’ Zarif asked. ‘Doing what he was doing?’ He flicked a fingernail against his glass. ‘Have you?’

  Another question Thorne had asked himself, and answered, a thousand times in the previous few days. ‘When I came down to your level, no.’

  Zarif looked up at the sound of his daughter calling to him from the top of the stairs. He answered her, watched her go, then turned back to Thorne. He emptied the last few drops of wine into his glass. ‘Time for you to leave…’

  Thorne reached across the table, grabbed the wineglass and pushed it hard into the old man’s face. He felt the glass break and ground it through the soft hair of Zarif’s moustache, blood springing bright to the surface and running down as Thorne twisted and pressed.

  ‘We need to lock up.’

  Thorne blinked away the fantasy and stood up. He walked to the counter, leaned back against it. ‘You got the message I gave to Memet about retaliation for the shooting?’ He pressed on before Zarif could answer. ‘Of course you did. Hence the message of your own on my front door.’

  Zarif spread his arms wide. Sweat stains darkened the white nylon of his shirt. ‘I’m sorry for that, really. That was Hassan’s doing.’

  This was a genuine surprise. ‘Hassan?’

  ‘He is normally the most cautious of my sons, but you upset him.’

  ‘Well now he’s upset me.’

  ‘I will be sure to tell him.’

  ‘Do that.’

  Zarif grunted, began to slide his bulk along the seat. ‘Have you replaced your door?’

  Thorne shook his head.

  ‘Please’–Zarif gestured casually towards the counter–‘take some money from the till.’

  He got to his feet and fixed Thorne with the same expression of vague amusement that had recently been on his daughter’s face. ‘Go ahead, help yourself…’

  Thorne wondered if perhaps there was more on offer than just a few tenners to cover the cost of a new door. Zarif had already admitted that Thorne was not the man he’d thought he was. Was he pushing a little, perhaps, trying to find out just what sort of a man Thorne really was…?

  Zarif’s smile was returned with bells on. ‘I think I’ll let you owe me,’ Thorne said.

  Zarif shrugged and stepped towards the door. He held out a hand in front of him, beckoning Thorne to leave. Thorne pushed away from the counter and walked slowly back the way he’d come in. He felt the faintest flutterings of pride, but at the same time knew that he was kidding himself. He guessed that the feeling would probably not last as far as the pavement.

  ‘Blood and money,’ Thorne said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You told me that you came to this country for bread and work. Blood and money. I think that’s closer to the mark…’

  Zarif stepped around Thorne and opened the door. The breeze began to stir the lanterns above their heads. Diamonds and stars of colour danced gently around the walls. ‘That first time, when we talked about names, about what they meant, we talked about yours also,’ Zarif said. ‘Thorne. Small and spiky, and difficult to get rid of.’

  Thorne remembered. ‘It depends on how seriously you take that kind of thing.’

  ‘I take my business very seriously…’

  ‘Good, because I’d rather not see your face again, unless it’s in a courtroom. I don’t want to come back here, however good the food is.’

  Zarif nodded. ‘We understand each other.’

  ‘Fuck me, no,’ Thorne said. He caught Arkan Zarif’s
eye, and held it. ‘Never.’

  Thorne turned towards the street, opening his mouth to suck down the fresh air. A few seconds later, he heard the door close behind him with a gentle click.

  He’d been right about the pride not lasting very long. It was a warm night, but Thorne was shivering as he walked back towards his car.

  He imagined it…he felt it, as a frenzy of metal wire, tangled and tightly wound somewhere deep inside him. Each time he’d managed to work a piece of it loose, he would pull at it in desperation, succeeding only in winding the coils even tighter, making the snarl that much harder to unravel…

  Thorne had put some music on, then turned the volume down. He’d opened a bottle of wine and left it untouched. Nothing made it easier. Nothing helped him make sense of the mess, or understand his own part in creating it. There’d been so many bodies and so much grief, and so little to show for it.

  He asked himself what else he could have expected. Hadn’t he always known that the likes of Baba Arkan Zarif were fireproof? They had complex mechanisms in place that protected them, soldiers who would sacrifice themselves and any number of men and women on the right side of the law who would keep them untarnished. Still, the knowledge that nobody was answerable, that no one would pay for a fraction of the carnage, was horribly corrosive.

  A few of Ryan’s people were dead and a couple of Zarif’s. Business had been hit on both sides. Life moved easily on, but not for Yusuf Izzigil, who’d lost both parents. Nor for the family of Francis Cullen, nor for Marcus Moloney’s widow, whose name Thorne had never even bothered to learn…

  And there were the other deaths, those for which, for good or evil, Thorne himself would always be responsible.

  Billy Ryan and Wayne Brookhouse.