The Burning Girl-4 (21 page)

The food was delicious, and the size of the portions decidedly non-nouvel e .. .

Arkan Zarif hovered at the table, watching as Thorne took the first mouthful of his main course. Thorne had chosen a dish he'd never seen before spiced lamb meatbal s wrapped in a layer of potato. He chewed, nodding enthusiastical y, and the old man beamed with delight. "I picked out the meat," he said. "Of course, I cooked it also, but picking out the meat is the important part." He watched for a few moments more, his mouth gaping, smiling as another forkful went in. "OK, I leave you to enjoy your dinner .. ."

Thorne swal owed and pointed to the seat opposite. "No, please. Join me. It's not often you get a chance to eat with the chef."

Zarif nodded. "I drink a glass of scotch with you." He turned and spoke in Turkish to his daughter, who stood, scowling, behind the counter. She looked at Thorne, who smiled sweetly back. The old man frowned as he sat down and leaned across to whisper. "Sema is permanently miserable," he said. "It is not your fault."

Thorne watched her pouring a glass of Johnny Walker for her father, and topping it up with mineral water from a plastic bottle. "Are you sure? I do tend to have that effect on women."

Zarif had a wheezy laugh. He repeatedly slapped a huge hand against his chest until it had died away.

Sema brought the drink to the table, then moved back behind the counter without a word.

"Serefe." Zarif held up his glass.

Thorne was drinking beer. He raised his bottle of Efes.

"It means "to-tmr honour"."

"To our honour," Thorne said, as the bottle touched the glass.

In the minute or so of silence that fol owed, Thorne devoured most of what was on his plate. He sliced off huge chunks of the meatbal , spooned up the rice, washed it down with the cold beer.

Zarif took, smal sips of his Scotch and water. "You like the lady's thigh," he said.

Thorne looked up, chewing. He grunted his confusion.

"This dish is cal ed kadinbudbu. This means "lady's thigh". So, you like the lady's thigh. I joke that if you don't enjoy the kadinbudbu, then maybe you don't like ladies. You see?" The wheezy laugh erupted again.

"What about vegetarians?" Thorne asked.

Zarif picked up the menu, gave him a look like that just proved the joke was true. "Al the dishes on the menu mean something. Turkish names always have meaning. What was your starter?"

"The fried aubergine .. ."

Zarif pointed to the dish on the menu. "Imam bayildi. This means "the priest fainted". You see? When this dish was given to the priest, he enjoyed it so much that he fainted from pleasure."

"I'm sorry I didn't faint," Thorne said, 'but it was very good .. ."

"Hunkar begendi! Zarif stabbed at the menu again. "This is a dish I make very wel . Diced lamb in white sauce. This means "the Emperor loved it"."

"Did he love it as much as the priest?"

Zarif didn't get the joke. "Al names mean something, but some have bad translations. Funny translations, you see? We have English customers who ask why the names are always in Turkish. I tel them if they were in English, my menu would have dishes cal ed rubbish kebab and stuffed prostitute!

Thorne laughed.

"No, real y this would put people off.. ."

"Only some people," Thorne said. "Others might come in special y."

Zarif laughed loudly, slapping his chest again, the drink spil ing over the edge of his glass.

Thorne suddenly thought about his father. He thought about how much he would have enjoyed this conversation. He pictured him laughing, scribbling down the names of the dishes .. .

"What about people's names?" Thorne said. "Do they always mean something?"

Zarif nodded. "Of course."

Thorne had finished eating and pushed away his plate. "What does Zarif mean?"

The old man thought for a few seconds. "Zarif is .. . "delicate"."

Thorne blinked and saw a breath of blood across Anaglypta wal paper. The body of Mickey Clayton bent over a kitchen chair. Gashes across his back .. .

"Delicate?" he asked.

Zarif nodded again. He waved to get his daughter's attention, and, when he had it, spoke quickly to her in Turkish. The scowl grew more pronounced as she moved across to a smal refrigerated cabinet to one side of the counter.

"Now, my first name, Arkan? This is the best joke of al . It has two meanings, depending on where you are, how you say it. It means "noble blood" or "honest blood". This sounds nice, you see? But it also means "your backside". It means "arse"."

Thorne laughed, swil ing the last of the beer around in the bottle. "My name means different things to different people as wel ."

"Right." Zarif waved his fingers in the air, searching for the words. "A thorn is smal , spiky .. ."

"Irritating." Thorne drained the bottle. "And it can be difficult to get rid of.. ."

Sema arrived and put down a dish in front of Thorne. He looked at Zarif for explanation.

"That is suklac. On the house .. ."

It was a simple rice pudding set thick, creamy and heavily flavoured with cinnamon.

"This is gorgeous," Thorne said.

"Thank you .. ."

Thorne saw the old man's expression change the second he heard the door open. He half turned and from the corner of his eye saw two men enter. The look on Sema's face told him that the two Zarif brothers he had yet to meet Memet and Tan had popped in to introduce themselves.

Arkan Zarif stood and walked over to the. counter, where the men took it in turn to lean across and kiss their sister. They began talking in Turkish to their father. Thorne watched them while pretending to look around. He stared at the ornate arrangements of tiles, mounted and hanging on the wal s next to Health and Safety certificates in cheap clip-frames.

Both brothers, unlike Hassan and their father, had very little hair. Memet, who Thorne put somewhere in his early forties, had a receding hairline and had chosen to wear what little he had left very short. He also had a goatee, thicker than Thorne's, but also more clearly defined, and like Thorne's, failing to hide a double chin. Tan, younger by maybe fifteen years, was shorter, and whip-thin. He wasn't losing his hair but had shaved it anyway aping his eldest brother, Thorne guessed. He too had facial hair, but it was little more than a pencil-line running along his top lip and around the edge of his chin, in the style George Michael had worn for a while until someone pointed out that it looked ridiculous. Tan clearly fancied himself as something of a hard man and stared across at Thorne while Memet did al the talking.

Knowing that Thorne wouldn't understand, Memet Zarif made no attempt to lower his voice as he spoke to his father. He smiled a lot and patted the old man's shoulder, but Thorne could hear a seriousness in the voice.

At the mention of his name Thorne glanced up. He remembered what Carol Chamberlain had said when she'd been talking about Bil y Ryan. About these people knowing as much about you as you did about them. Knowing more .. . Thorne returned Tan's thousand-yard stare for a second or two before going back to his pudding.

It was disconcerting, exciting even, to think that one of these men -Thorne was putting his money on Memet Zarif had probably given the order to have Mickey Clayton and the others executed. If he, or his brothers, thought that the law was going to go easier on them because they hadn't wielded the gun or the knife themselves, they hadn't learned as much as Thorne presumed they had. And, though Thorne had his own ideas, the received wisdom was that the Zarif brothers were also responsible for the death of DS Marcus Moloney. Whatever he thought of Nick Tughan, Thorne knew that he would make Memet, Hassan and Tan pay for that.

When Thorne looked up from his suklac again, Memet and Tan were at the table.

"What is it you want?" Memet Zarif asked.

Thorne took another mouthful, then loaded his spoon again. When he answered the question, it was as if he'd just that second remembered he'd been asked it. "I wanted some dinner, which I'm actual y stil having, so maybe you should think about being polite and leaving me in peace to finish it. If you want me to get as annoyed as I should be and cause a scene in your father's restaurant you know, maybe turn over a table or two I suggest you carry on with the attitude." He turned to the younger brother. "And if that look is supposed to be intimidating, you'd better get a new manual, son. You just look like a retard .. ." Thorne turned away before the two men had any chance to react. He leaned round them, caught their sister's eye, and scribbled in the air the universal y accepted gesture when asking for the bil .

Memet and Tan walked to a table in the corner, where they were quickly joined by another man, who came scuttling from the back of the room. Sema brought them coffee and biscuits dusted with sugar. They lit cigarettes and spoke a mixture of Turkish and English in hushed voices.

Arkan Zarif carried Thorne's bil across on a plate. "You wil stay for some coffee .. .?"

Thorne took a piece of Turkish delight from the plate and examined the bil . "No, thank you. Time to go, I think." He dug around in his wal et for some cash.

Zarif looked towards the table in the corner, then back to Thorne. "My sons are suspicious of the police. They have bad tempers, I know that, but they stay out of trouble."

Thorne chewed the sweet, and decided that the old man's thinking was only marginal y less divorced from reality than that of his own father. He dropped a ten and a five on to the plate.

"Why the suspicion of the police?" he said.

Zarif looked uncomfortable. "Back in Turkey, there were some problems. Nothing serious. Memet was a little wild sometimes .. ."

"Is that why you left and came here?"

Zarif waved his hands emphatical y. "No. We came for simple reasons. Al Turkish people want is bread and work. We came to this country for bread and work."

Thorne stood and picked up his jacket. He thanked the old man, praised the food, then walked towards the door, thinking that you could work for bread, or you could just take somebody else's .. .

Common sense told his feet to keep on walking past the table in the corner, but another part of his brain was stil thinking about names.

Irritating. Difficult to get rid of.. .

The three men at the table fel silent and looked at him. The blue-grey smoke from their cigarettes curled up towards the ceiling, floating around the hanging lamps like the manifestation of a dozen genies.

Thorne pointed upwards at the swirls and strands of smoke, then leaned down to address Memet Zarif. "If I was you, I should start making wishes .. ."

He was stil smiling as he made his way back to the car, taking out his mobile and dial ing the number as he walked.

"Dad? It's me. Listen, I've got a great one for you. Actual y, we can do a whole list, if you like, but I think you should do this one as a trivia question first. Right, have you got a pen? OK, what sort of ... No, make that: where would you be if you ordered a stuffed prostitute?"

FIFTEEN

Rooker had been moved earlier that week to HMP Salisbury, one of a handful of prisons in the country with a protected witness wing. He'd pronounced himself delighted with the move.

Now he was rattling around with only half a dozen other cons for company and not a paintbrush in sight.

"How did Bil y Ryan first approach you?" Thorne asked. "How was the idea of kil ing Alison Kel y first brought up?"

The purpose-built interview suite had freshly decorated pale yel ow wal s, but was stil a lot less glamorous than it sounded. Whoever had designed and equipped the place hadn't put in a long day: a table, chairs, recording equipment, an ashtray .. .

Rooker cleared his throat. "I'd met Ryan a couple of times .. ."

"Like when you got the original contract on Kevin Kel y?"

"I'm not talking about that."

"Ryan hired you for that as wel , though, didn't he?"

"I thought we'd got past this .. ."

"It's amazing he came back to you after you'd messed that one up."

Rooker sat back in his chair and folded his arms. He looked like a sulky kid.

"Listen," Thorne said. "This is going to get brought up in court. Ryan's brief is going to be al over you, doing as much as he can to discredit your statement. You're not exactly a model citizen, are you?"

Rooker leaned forward slowly, pul ed his tobacco tin across the table and began to rol up. He was a different character from the one Thorne had first met at Park Royal a month before. It was clear that he had stil not ful y recovered from the stabbing, but also that his initial cockiness was far from being the whole story. Thorne knew very wel that survival in prison was al about front. Al about what others thought you were. Pretence could be every bit as useful as a phone card or a stolen chisel.

"The point is that I was perfect," Rooker said. "The word was that I had been the one hired to do Kevin Kel y the year before .. ."

"Right. The word."

"Like I said, that's what everyone thought. Which made me the ideal choice for Bil y Ryan when he decided to do the daughter."

"The perfect cover."

"Exactly."

Rooker's cigarette was already alight. Thorne watched the smoke rise, remembering the words he'd spoken to Memet Zarif a week before, envious now, as he had been then. As he was around anyone who stil had the joy of smoking. Some of Thorne's more prosaic dreams were fil ed with smoke-rings and nicotine and the glorious tightening in the chest as it hits ..

.

"So, how did Ryan make the approach? He couldn't risk being seen with you."

"Not straight away, no. It was al arranged by a third party. A face cal ed Harry Little. He's dead now .. ."

"In suspicious circumstances?"

"Not as far as I know. He was in his late fifties back then, I think."

"Go on .. ."

"We met in a pub in Camden. It might have been the Dublin Castle, I can't remember. Anyway, Harry was al over me. Very friendly. We'd never been particularly matey, so I knew he was after something, and I knew it was something heavy because he had a reputation, you know? He starts talking about Bil y Ryan, going round the houses with it. I mean, we're getting through a fair few pints, know what I mean? Eventual y, he says that Bil y wants a meet, and that he'd be in touch with when and where and what have you, and it was obvious even then that this was something a bit special." He saw enough of a change in Thorne's face to qualify what he'd said. "Special as in different-, you know? From the normal run of things."