The Burning Girl-4 (6 page)

"Thanks for doing that," he said, final y.

"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 hal . He glared at himself briefly in the hal 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, al 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 official y from 'mid' to 'late' stage. Maybe it wasn't defined by anything clinical at al . Maybe it was just the first time that the person with the disease almost kil ed themself.. .

"Bol ocks," 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 verbal y abusive behaviour. Stil , his father hadn't wandered away and fal en 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 catch phrase he cal ed 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.

"Fal s are top of the list, if I remember rightly. "Impact accidents", they're cal ed. Electrocution's another good one. Fire, obviously. Choking, suffocation, DIY incidents .. ."

"Why didn't you give them my number to cal ?"

His father continued to count off, but began mouthing the words silently. After half a minute or so he stopped, and went back to poking about among the coils and circuits scattered across the table.

Thorne watched him for a while. "I'l stay the night," he said.

The old man grinned and got to his feet. He reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled five-pound note. He held it out, waved it at Thorne. "Here you go. Here's some .. . bugger ..

." He closed his eyes, struggling to find the word. "A piece of the stuff people buy things with .. ."

"What do I want money for?"

"Money!"

"What do I want it for?"

"To nip down the road and get us some chips. I stil haven't had my fucking dinner yet.. ."

He lay awake in the dark, thinking about the burning girl.

He'd never real y stopped thinking about her, for one reason or another, not for any significant length of time, but lately, for obvious reasons, she'd been on his mind a great deal. The colours and the smel s, which had understandably faded over the years, were suddenly more vivid, more pungent than they had been at any time since it had al happened. Not that he'd had much more than a second or two back then to take it al in. Once the flames had taken hold, he'd had to be away sharpish, down that hil towards the spot where he'd parked the car.

He'd moved almost as quickly as the girl herself.

The rest of it the girl's face and what have you had been fil ed in afterwards. He'd seen it, swathed in bandages, splashed across every front page and every television screen. Later, he'd seen what she looked like with the bandages off; it was impossible to tel how her face had been before.

It was funny, he thought. Ironic. If he had seen her face that day at the playground, he would have realised she wasn't the one. Afterwards, of course, nobody would mistake her for anyone else ever again.

He drifted, eventual y, towards sleep. Thoughts giving way to fuzzy pictures and feelings .. .

He remembered her arms flailing in the instant before she began to run, as though it were nothing more serious than a wasp. He remembered the sound of her shoes on the playground as he turned away. He remembered feeling like such a fucking idiot when he realised she was entirely the wrong girl.

Thorne spent most of the night writhing across nylon sheets, sinking into the ludicrously soft mattress in his father's spare room and dragging back the duvet which had slid away from him down the natural slope of the bed. He felt like he'd only just got off to sleep when his phone rang. He checked his watch and saw that it was already gone nine-thirty. At the same instant that he began to panic, he remembered that he'd cal ed Brigstocke the night before to tel him what was going on. They wouldn't be expecting him at the office.

He reached down towards where the phone lay chirping on top of his clothes. His neck ached and his arms were freezing.

It was Hol and. "I'm in a video shop in Wood Green," he said. "We've got two bodies, stil warm. And that's not the title of one of the videos .. ."

FOUR

The uniformed constable who'd been first on the scene was sitting at a smal table in a back room, next to a teenage boy whom Thorne guessed was Muslum Izzigil's son. Thorne stared across at them from the doorway. He couldn't decide which of the two looked the younger, or the most upset.

Hol and stood at Thorne's shoulder. "The boy ran out into the street when he found them. Constable Terry was having breakfast in the cafe opposite. He heard the boy screaming."

Thorne nodded and closed the door quietly. He turned and moved back into the shop, where screens had been hastily erected around the bodies. The scene of crime team moved with a practised efficiency, but it seemed to Thorne that the usual banter the dark humour, the craze -was a little muted. Thorne had hunted serial kil ers; he had known the atmosphere at crime scenes to be charged with respect, even fear, at the presentation, the offering up, of the latest victim. This was not what they were looking at now. This was almost certainly a contract kil ing. Stil , there was an odd feeling in the room. Perhaps it was the fact that there were two bodies. That they had been husband and wife.

"Where was the boy when it happened?"

"Upstairs," Hol and said. "Getting ready for school. He didn't hear anything."

Thorne nodded. The kil er had used a silencer. "This one's a little less showy than the X-Man," he said.

Muslum Izzigil was sitting against the wal between a display of children's videos and a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Lara Croft. His head was cocked to one side, his eyes half-open and popping. A thin line of blood ran from the back of his head, along freshly shaved jowls, soaking pink into the col ar of a white nylon shirt. The body of his wife lay, face downwards, across his legs. There was very little blood, and only the smal , blackened hole behind her ear told the story of what had happened. Or at least, some of it... Which one had he kil ed first?

Did he make the husband watch while his wife was executed? Did the wife die only because she had tried to save her husband?

Thorne looked up from the bodies. He noticed the smal camera in the corner of the shop. "Too much to hope for, I suppose?"

"Far too much," Hol and said. "The recorder's not exactly hard to find. It's over there underneath the counter. The shooter took the tape with him."

"One to show the grandchildren .. ."

Hol and knelt and pointed with a biro to the back of the dead woman's neck. "Twenty-two, d'you reckon?"

Thorne could see where the blood was gathering then. It encircled her neck like a delicate necklace, but it was pooling, sticky between her chin and the industrial grey carpet. "Looks like it," he said. He was already moving across the shop towards the back room. Towards what was going to be a difficult conversation .. .

Constable Terry got to his feet when Thorne came through the door. Thorne waved him back on to his chair. "What's the boy's name?"

The boy answered the question himself: "Yusuf Izzigil."

AQ

Thorne put him at about seventeen. Probably taking A levels. He'd gel ed his short, black hair into spikes and was making a decent enough job of growing a moustache. The hysteria which Hol and had mentioned, which had first alerted the police, had given way to a stil ness. He was quiet now, and seemingly composed, but the tears were stil coming just as quickly, each one pushed firmly away with the heel of a hand the instant it brimmed and began. to fal .

He started to speak again, without being asked. "I was getting ready upstairs. My father always came down just after eight o'clock, to deal with the tapes that had been returned in the overnight box. My mother came down to help him get things set up once she'd put the breakfast things away." He spoke wel , and slowly, with no trace of an accent. Thorne realised suddenly that the maroon sweater and grey trousers were a uniform, and guessed that the boy went to a private school.

"So you heard nothing?" Thorne asked. "No raised voices?"

The boy shook his head. "I heard the bel go on the door when someone opened it, but that isn't unusual."

"It was a bit early, though, wasn't it?"

"We often have customers who come in on their way to work, to pick up a film that's been returned the night before."

"Anything else .. .?"

"I was in the bathroom after that. There was water running. If not, I might have heard something." His hand went to his face, pressed and wiped. "They had silencers on their guns, didn't they?"

It was an odd thing to say. Thorne wondered if perhaps the boy knew more than he was tel ing, but decided it was probably down to seeing far too many of the shitty British gangster movies his father kept on the shelves.

"What makes you think there was more than one of them, Yusuf?"

"A week ago two boys came in. About the same age as me, my father said. They tried to scare him."

"What did they do?"

"Pathetic stuff, threats. Dog mess in a video case. Throwing a litter bin through the window." He pointed towards the shop front where a thick black curtain now ran across the plate-glass window and front door, rigged up to hide the activity within from the eyes of passers-by. "There was a letter first. My father ignored it."

"Did he keep the letter?"

"My mother wil have filed it somewhere. She never throws anything away."

The boy realised what he'd said, and blinked slowly. The hand that went to his face stayed there a little longer this time. Thorne remembered the sign he'd seen stuck to the front of the til : You are being recorded. "Did your father get it on tape? The incident with the two boys?"

"I should think so. He recorded everything, but it won't be there any more."

Thorne asked the question with a look.

"Because he used the same few tapes over and over again," Yusuf said. "Changed them half a dozen times every day, and recorded over them. He was always trying to save money, but this business with the videotapes was real y stupid, considering that we sold the bloody things. Always trying to save money .. ."

The boy's head dropped. The tears that came were left to run their course, the hands that had been wiping them away now clutching the countertop.

"You're not a child, Yusuf," Thorne said. "You're far too clever to buy any of my bul shit, so I won't give you any, al right?" He glanced back towards the screens, towards what lay behind them. "This is not about an argument, or an affair, or an unpaid bil . I'm not going to tel you that I can catch whoever did this, because I don't know if I can. I do know I'm going to have a bloody good try, though."

Thorne waited, but the boy did not look up. He gave a smal nod to Terry, who stood and put an arm on Yusuf's shoulder. The constable said something, a few murmured words of comfort, as Thorne closed the door behind him.

He arrived back in the shop in time to see the black curtain swept aside and DCI Nick Tughan stepping through it like a bad actor.

"Right. What have we got?" Tughan was a stick-thin Irishman with less than generous lips. His short, sandy hair was always clean, and the col ars crisp beneath a variety of expensive suits. "Who's fil ing me in .. .?"

Thorne smiled and shrugged: Me, given half a chance, you tosser. He was happy to see Hol and walking across to do the honours, clearly not relishing the task, but knowing that he'd earn himself a drink later. A pint sounded like a good idea, even at eleven o'clock in the morning. Including the Izzigils, there were a dozen people inside the smal shop, which, combined with the heat coming off the SOC lights, had turned the place into a sauna very quickly. Keen to get some air, Thorne stepped towards the front door, just as another person pushed through the curtain. This one was dressed from head to foot in black himself.