Thorne saw Clarke's expression start to darken when he didn't answer him instantly. He knew that the water was suddenly getting deep and that he shouldn't wade in any further. "I'm sorry, but I can't really go into."
Clarke held up his hands. He understood.
"I just wanted you to be clear about something," Thorne continued. "If Rooker comes out of prison, it's only so that the man who was behind what happened to your daughter can go in!
Clarke pondered this for a minute. He turned his chair towards the fire, held his hands towards it. Thorne thought that it had suddenly become a lot colder. He also thought: How can he stand to look into a fire? What does he see when he stares into the flames?
"You should have a picture of Jess," Clarke said, suddenly. The smallest of shivers crept across the nape of Thorne's neck. He felt as if the man opposite him had somehow known what he was thinking. He watched as Clarke got up and walked across to a pine chest in the corner of the room. Photos in assorted metal frames were scattered across the top.
"Right."
"A reminder."
Clarke picked up a small frame, began removing the clips that held the picture in place. "This is a good one." He removed the glass and took out the photograph. He waved it at him.
Thorne stood and moved across the room to take the picture from Clarke's outstretched hand. Clarke handed it over and stepped towards the door. "That's the "before". You need the "after" as well. I don't keep any out down here because they upset Isobel. That's the only reason."
He left the room. Thorne heard him running up the stairs, heard a door open and close.
You should have a picture of Jess.
Thorne thought about how Clarke had said it. As though it were a simple piece of good advice that would aid his well-being. You should check your cholesterol. You should keep up your pension payments. You should have a photo of my dead daughter.
Thorne knew that Clarke was well aware that this visit was not procedural. This was not part of any inquiry, and nor was the offer of the photograph. This was something Ian Clarke wanted Thorne to have. Thought he should have.
When he heard a door close upstairs, Thorne stepped out into the hallway and waited near the front door. Now seemed as good a time as any to be making a move.
Clarke jogged quickly down the stairs and pressed a small black book into Thorne's hands. "I thought you might want to look at her diary. It doesn't matter if you don't. Let me have it back either way when you've finished with it."
"Right, of course."
Clarke handed over the photo with a small nod. Thorne took it with barely a glance, afraid of staring. Of being seen to stare. When he looked back at Clarke, it was clear from the man's expression that this was a reaction he'd seen a hundred times before.
"There were gangsters at her funeral," he said. "Murderers and drug barons and men who get paid to hurt people. They came to show their respects after she'd killed herself." He spoke calmly, though the anger was clear enough, like something moving behind a muslin curtain.
"It was a gorgeous day when we buried her, a really stunning day. We all said how that was Jess's doing, because she loved the good weather so much, and then that lot turned up in dark suits and sunglasses like something out of Reservoir Dogs and ruined everything. Kevin Kelly and his tarty wife, and that other one who'd taken over. Ryan. A bunch of them. All standing there, sweating, with huge wreaths. One of them spelled out her name, for pity's sake. Hovering with tasteless fucking wreaths for my little girl, who'd died because her friend happened to be a gangster's daughter."
Thorne was finding it hard to look at him. Rubbing his thumbs across the shiny surface of the photo in his hands. Nodding when it felt as though he should.
"We worked our arses off to send Jess to that school, to raise the money for the fees. What did Kelly have to do? How many people did he have to kill or rob to send that little ... to send his little girl to that school?"
Thorne saw a figure appear on the landing at the top of the stairs: a teenage girl with long, ash-blond hair.
Clarke turned when he saw Thorne raise his eyes. "Isobel." Thorne was unsure whether Clarke was talking to the girl or introducing her. He couldn't help but wonder how much she looked like her half-sister. He wanted to look at the photo to check, but the picture on top was of Jessica after her attack, and Thorne felt unable to move it, to slide the photo of her unscarred to the front.. .
"Hello," he said.
The girl tugged at a corner of her sweater, muttered a sullen greeting in return. Clarke gave Thorne a weary, parental shrug. "She's thirteen," he said by way of explanation. Then his face changed.
"She'll be fourteen in a couple of weeks." He reached past Thorne to open the front door.
Thorne toyed with some cod response about kids growing up too fast, but before he had a chance to make it, Clarke stepped in close and lowered his voice. "This man, whoever he is, attempted to murder Jess. You said that. You said it a couple of times, actually."
"Sorry, I don't."
"He didn't attempt to murder her, Mr. Thorne. He murdered her." Clarke looked Thorne in the eyes as he spoke.
Thorne instinctively looked away, but then, ashamed, forced himself to meet Clarke's eyes again.
"It took a couple of years for her to die, but he murdered her." There was little to say except 'goodbye', so they both said it, and let the front door close between them.
Thorne glanced back. Through the frosted squares of red, blue and green glass in the front door, he could make out the shape of Ian Clarke climbing slowly up the stairs towards his daughter. The crowd at the bus stop is just that at first: a crowd; massed, indistinguishable, and not just because of the quality of the film. A tight knot of people bunched on the pavement, bundled up against the cold weather or, in the case of the girls, huddled into a gang, a million things to talk about while they wait for the bus. There is no sound, but it isn't hard to imagine the screams, the shouts of anger and incomprehension.
The knot unravels in a moment, people wheeling or jumping away, revealing the man for the first time. An old woman points at him, pulls at the sleeve of the woman with the push chair standing next to her. Girls cling to one another, to blazers and bags, as the man, his face hidden inside the hood of a dark anorak, turns and jogs casually away up the street.. .
Hendricks appeared from the kitchen. "The food'll be ready in a couple of minutes," he said.
Thorne got off the sofa and ejected the tape from the VCR. While he was up, he grabbed the bottle of wine from the mantelpiece and refilled Carol Chamberlain's glass.
"Nothing from any other angles?" she said. Thorne shook his head as he swallowed from his own glass. "These are the best pictures we could get." CCTV footage seemed to play an increasingly large part in most investigations these days. Often, the cameras were no more than a deterrent, and a pretty unsuccessful one at that. The crack dealers on Coldharbour Lane and the heroin mules around Manor House knew exactly where they were and treated them with the same disdain they might accord a traffic warden. Most of the time, they would happily go about their business in full view of the camera, knowing just when to turn a head or angle a shoulder to avoid the incriminating shot, then wink at the lens when the deal was done. Once in a while, though, Thorne would find himself staring at more significant footage: grainy, black-and-white pictures of armed robbers, of killers, or, more disturbingly, of those about to become their victims.
In this case, a potential victim who got lucky.
"It doesn't make sense," Chamberlain said. "How did he ever think he'd get away with it? If, God forbid, he hadn't been rumbled. If that girl hadn't seen what he was doing with the lighter fluid and he'd managed to set her alight."
"Even if he had, he might still have got away," Thorne said. "People would have been far more concerned with helping the girl. You know as well as I do that by and large people are afraid to do anything. They don't want to be the have-a-go hero who gets shot, or gets a knife stuck in him."
Chamberlain stared into her glass. "Why a bus stop, though? Why the different MO?"
"There's a lot more security around schools now," Hendricks said.
"He'd've been lucky to find a school like Jessica Clarke's, where he could just march up to the playground."
She shook her head. "The middle of Swiss Cottage at four o'clock in the afternoon? It's stupid. The place was heaving." Hendricks leaned his head back into the kitchen to check on something for a second. "He obviously wanted to make a splash."
"Do you think it's the same bloke?" Thorne stared hard at Chamberlain.
"Yes, I'm fairly certain. It looked like the same anorak." Thorne shook his head. "No, I don't mean that. Do you think it's the same man who set fire to Jessica Clarke twenty years ago?" There was no quick answer. "He didn't look old," she said. "I know you couldn't see his face. It was more the way he held himself, I suppose."
"You're thinking about Rooker, about somebody like he is," Thorne said.
"I know."
"Suppose this man was in his early twenties back then. He'd only be in his early forties now."
"It was seeing him run away. It seemed wrong, somehow, for the man I was imagining."
"He jogged away," Thorne said. "Even if he was in his fifties, or sixties even, that's not out of the question, is it?" Hendricks carried his glass across the room and topped it up. "Just jogging away, casually, like he did, makes a lot of sense. It's the right thing to do if you don't want to draw attention to yourself, if you don't want to look like you're legging it away from something." From the kitchen, the timer on Thorne's cooker suddenly buzzed. Hendricks put down his wineglass and went to do whatever was necessary.
"If it is him," Chamberlain said, 'is Billy Ryan behind what he's doing now?"
"God knows, but, if he is, I haven't got the first idea why." Hendricks swore loudly. Either dinner was ruined or he'd burned himself.
"You all right in there, Delia?" Thorne shouted. There was another bout of slightly more subdued swearing. Chamberlain laughed. "It smells good, whatever it is." She drained her glass, glancing at her watch in the process.
"Listen, why don't you stay the night?" Thorne asked. "We can sort out a bed."
"No, I'm going to get the last train. If you can give me a taxi number."
"It's no trouble, really. I'm sure Jack can make his own breakfast." She shook her head and took a step towards the kitchen. Thorne put a hand on her shoulder. "When we get Ryan, he's going to tell us who took his money twenty years ago and burned Jessica. He's going to give me a name." He pointed towards the VCR. "If it was this bloke, I'll get him. If it wasn't this bloke, and whoever it was is still alive, I'll get him. Then, I'll get this bloke as well. That's a promise,
Carol."
When Chamberlain looked at him, her expression a mixture of gratitude and amusement, Thorne realised that his hand had moved from her shoulder. In his effort to reassure her, he'd been gently rubbing her back in small circles. She raised her eyebrows comically. "So, this offer to stay the night," she said. "What exactly did you have in mind?"
Ian Clarke sat on the sofa, his arm around his wife. He stared across the room in the direction of the television.
He cried once a year on his first daughter's birthday. The day that was also the anniversary of her death. For the rest of the time, everything was kept inside, squashed and pressed inside, his ribs, like the bars of a cage, holding in the thoughts and feelings and dark desires.
He sat still, going over the details of Thorne's visit, the things that were said, feeling as if his ribs might crack and splinter at any moment.
His wife laughed softly at something on the television and nestled her head into his chest. His hand moved automatically to her hair. He stared at a small square of white wall a foot or so above the screen. From time to time, he could hear a gentle thud on the ceiling as his second daughter moved around upstairs.
Thorne lay awake in bed, wondering if it was simply indigestion he was suffering from, or something a little harder to get rid of. Enjoyable as the evening had been, he'd been happy to see Carol call for a cab. And he'd been relieved when, later, Hendricks had decided to leave the clearing up until the morning and get an early night. The uncertainty that surrounded every aspect of the Billy Ryan/ Jessica Clarke case had squatted next to him all evening, like an unwanted dinner guest. Now he felt it pressing him down into the mattress as he stared up at the Ikea light fitting he hated so much. Not knowing was the worst thing of all.
In the course of some of the cases he'd investigated over the years, Thorne had learned things, seen things, understood things that, given the choice, he'd have preferred to avoid. Still, in spite of all the horrible truths he'd been forced to confront, he preferred knowledge to ignorance, though the dreadful weight of each was very different. Beneath the duvet, his hand drifted down to his groin. He fiddled around half-heartedly for a few minutes, then gave up, unable to concentrate.
He began to think about the photos of Jessica Clarke, out in the hallway inside his leather jacket. He pictured the image of her blasted and puckered face pressing against the silk lining of the pocket. He thought about the diary in his bag, waiting for him. It was reading he'd postpone until another night.
Reaching across for his Walkman, he pulled on the headphones and pressed play: The Mountain, Steve Earle's 1999 collaboration with the Del McCoury Band. He rubbed at the tightness in his chest, deciding that it almost certainly was indigestion.
It was impossible to stay down for too long, listening to bluegrass.
THIRTEEN
"You're looking a bit better, Gordon," Holland said. Rooker grunted. "It's all relative, isn't it?"
"OK then," Stone said. "You look better than a bag of shit, but not quite as good as Tom Cruise. How's that?"
The prison officer who had been standing behind them took a step forward, leaned down. "Can we hurry this up?" They were gathered around a table in the small office-cum-cubicle in a corner of the visits area. A TV and VCR had been set up. Holland was stabbing at a button, trying to cue up the tape. Without looking at him, Stone waved a piece of paper towards the prison officer. "Don't worry, it's not a long list." The paper was waved in Rooker's direction. "He isn't exactly your most popular guest, is he?"
This was part of the checking-up that Thorne had spoken about to Tughan when the doubts about Rooker were first raised. While Stone and Holland had headed into HMP Park Royal, others on the team were looking at those who had recently moved in the opposite direction; those who might have associated closely enough with Gordon Rooker to do him a favour on the outside.
The list Stone was brandishing contained the names of all those who had been to the prison to see Rooker in the last six months. If the man who had made the calls to Carol Chamberlain, and perhaps been responsible for the attack in Swiss Cottage, had cooked up something with Rooker, chances were the plans would have been hatched in the visiting area. Something could have been organised via the telephone, but it was highly unlikely. As a Category B prisoner, any calls made by Gordon Rooker would, at the very least, be randomly monitored. If Rooker had an accomplice, Thorne felt sure that his name would be on the visitors list.
"It's easy to check names and addresses," Thorne had told Holland, 'but I want you to go through them with Rooker in person, get any extra information you can from him. See how he reacts when you show him the pictures. Let's make absolutely sure we're not being pissed about."
Copies of the visiting area's security tapes had been requested from the prison, sifted through and edited until the team was left with a sequence no more than a few minutes long. This was the tape which Holland, Stone and Rooker were about to watch.
"Here we go," Holland said, leaning back from the video recorder. Stone patted Rooker on the shoulder. "This is very much a highlights package, Gordon. And we want you to provide the commentary, all right?"
Rooker picked up a pair of glasses from the table and inched his chair a little clos
er to the screen.
Out of the screen-snow came a series of clumsily cut-together shots, the images jumping disconcertingly from one to the next: half a dozen individuals walking into the visiting area, depositing bags and coats on or beneath chairs and sitting down. Each a different size in frame, sliding or slumping behind the narrow tables not a single one of them looking particularly pleased to be there.
"Cath, my eldest daughter." Rooker pointed and spoke while Holland scribbled. On the screen, a dark-haired woman in her late thirties sat down. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt. If she'd been wearing a bib, she might have been a prisoner. "Her son's being taken on by West Ham."
A jump-cut replaced the woman on the screen with another. In her early seventies, probably. A buttoned-up green overcoat. Handbag clutched in front of her on the table. "My mother's youngest sister, Iris. Pops by every now and again to tell me who's died." A man, around the same age as Rooker. Arms moving animatedly as he spoke. Dirty grey suit and hair the same colour. "Tony Sollinger, an old drinking mate. He got in touch with Lizzie out of the blue, told her he wanted to come in. Insisted on telling me he had cancer, for some fucking reason."
A woman, anywhere between fifty and seventy. Hair hidden beneath a patterned headscarf. Saying little. "Speak of the devil. The wife, the ex-wife, as near as dammit, on her annual visit." From somewhere on the wing behind them came a sudden howl of what might have been rage, or pain, or neither. Holland and Stone both turned. The prison officer didn't so much as raise his head.
"You can see why people aren't queuing up to visit, though," Stone said. "It's hardly fucking Alton Towers." The prison officer looked like he was laughing, but he did it without making any noise.
"Wayne Brookhouse," Rooker continued. "He used to go out with my youngest." A man in his early twenties. Dark, curly hair and glasses. Lighting a cigarette from the nub-end of another. "My daughter never bothers, so he comes in, tells me what she's been up to. Supposed to be a mechanic, probably just a cut-and-shut merchant. Ducks and dives, but he's a decent lad."
The Burning Girl Thorne 4 Page 13
