The Burning Girl-4

Synopsis:

X marks the spot and when that spot is a corpse's naked back and the X is carved in blood, DI Tom Thorne is in no doubt that the dead man is the latest victim of a particularly vicious contract kil er. It's morbid and messy

but it's a mystery with plenty of clues. This is turf warfare between North London gangs. Organised crime boss Bil y Ryan is moving into someone else's patch, and that someone is not best pleased.

ThoRNe's already got plenty on his plate when he agrees to help out ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain, frantical y raking through the ashes of an old case that has come back to haunt her.

When schoolgirl Jessica Clarke was turned into a human torch twenty years ago, it made horrific headlines. But now there's something worrying in the smal print: Gordon Rooker, the man Carol put away for the crime, is up for possible release, and it seems there's a copycat at large. Or perhaps it's someone trying to 'right' a few wrongs. For Jessica Clarke was the victim of mistaken identity. The intended target was the daughter of a gangland boss, a woman who would later grow up and marry a man named Bil y Ryan... For Thorne, what starts as a tenuous link becomes two pieces of the same puzzle. Past and present gradual y fuse together to form a new, and very nasty, riddle. One that involves more kil ings, protection rackets, human cargoes, and a murderous family with no values

except gain at any price. And when an X is carved on his front door, Tom Thorne knows that the smouldering embers of a long-dead case are about to erupt into flames... The fourth Tom Thorne novel, The Burning Girl blazes a trail through territory now marked with the unique Bil ingham twist. Like the best of both British and American crime writing, the author delivers a plot coiled into tautness, punches you don't see coming, and characters who wil remain seared into the memory long after the heart-stopping finale...

Also by this author

SLEEPYHEAD

SCAREDY CAT

LAZYBONES

You can visit the author's website at: www.markbil ingham.com

Mark Bil ingham

THE BURNING GIRL

Little, Brown

A Little, Brown Book

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Little, Brown

Copyright 2004 Mark Bil ingham

Lyrics from "Bigmouth Strikes Again' reproduced by kind permission of Morrissey and Sanctuary Records.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Al rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Al characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

HARDBACK ISBN 0 316 72574 9 C FORMAT ISBN 0 316 72573 0

Typeset in Plantin by M Rules

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St. Ives plc

__________ Little, Brown

For Hilary Hale

"And now I know how Joan of Arc felt,

Now I know how Joan of Arc felt, As the flames rose to her Roman nose, And her Walkman started to melt .. ."

"Bigmouth Strikes Again' The Smiths

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THE PRICE OF BEING HUMAN

Later, Carol Chamberlain would convince herself that she had actual y been dreaming about Jessica Clarke when she got the first cal . That the noise of the phone ringing had dragged her awake; away from the sound and the smel of it. The fuzzy picture of a girl running, the colours climbing up her back, exploding and flying at her neck like scarves of gold and crimson.

Whether the dream was imagined or not, she'd begun to see it al again the moment she'd put down the phone. Sitting on the edge of the bed, shivering; Jack, who had stirred only momentarily, dead to the world behind her.

She saw it al .

The colours were as bright, and the sound as clear and crisp as it had been that morning twenty years before. She was certain of it. Though Carol had not been there, had not seen any of it with her own eyes, she had spoken to everyone, everyone who had. Now she believed that when she ran over it in her mind, when she imagined it, she was seeing it al exactly as it had happened .. .

The sound of the man's feet on the grass as he climbed the slope, of his tuneless humming was drowned out by the noise from the playground. Beneath the high-pitched peaks of shouts and screams was a low throb of chatter and gossip, a wave of conversation that rol ed across the playground and away down the hil side, towards the main road.

The man listened to it as he got nearer, unable to make out anything clearly. It would almost certainly be talk about boys and music. Who was in and who was out. He could hear another sound, too: the buzz of a lawn-mower from the far side of the school where a team of gardeners was working. They wore green boiler-suits, and so did he. His was only missing the embroidered council logo.

Hands in his pockets, cap pul ed down low on his head, he walked around the perimeter of the playground to where the girl and a bunch of her friends were gathered. A few of them were leaning back on the metal, cross-hatched fence, bouncing gently against it, relaxed.

The man removed the secateurs from his belt and squatted, inches away from the girls on the other side of the fence. With one hand, he began snipping at the weeds that sprouted around the base of a concrete fence post. With the other, he reached into his pocket for the can of lighter fluid.

It had always been the smel , more than anything, that had worried him. He'd made sure the can was ful and there was not the faintest hiss or gurgle as he squeezed, as the jet of fluid shot from the plastic nozzle through the gap in the fence. His concern was that some hint of it, a whiff as it soaked into the material of the blue, knee-length skirt, might drift up on the breeze and alert the girl or one of her friends.

He needn't have worried. By the time he'd laid the can down on the grass and reached for the lighter, he'd used half the fuel at least, and the girls had been too busy chattering to notice anything. It surprised him that for fifteen seconds or more the girl's skirt smouldered quietly before final y catching. He was also surprised by the fact that she wasn't the one who screamed first.. .

Jessica had only one ear on Ali's story about the party she'd been to and Manda's tale of the latest tiff with her boyfriend. She was stil thinking about the stupid row with her mum that had gone on the whole weekend, and the talking-to she'd been given by her father before he'd left for work that morning. When AH pul ed a face and the others laughed, Jessica joined in without real y appreciating the joke.

It felt like a smal tug at first, and then a tickle, and she leaned forward to smooth down the back of her skirt. She saw Manda's face change then, watched her mouth widen, but she never heard the sound that came out of it. Jessica was already feeling the agony lick at the tops of her legs as she lurched away from the fence and started to run .. .

Long distant from it now, Carol Chamberlain imagined the panic and the pain as shocked as she always was at the unbearable events unfolding in her mind's eye.

Horribly quickly. Dreadful y slowly .. .

An hour before dawn, it was dark inside the bedroom, but the searing light of something unnatural blazed behind her eyes. With hindsight, with knowledge, she was everywhere, able to see and hear it al .

She saw girls' mouths gape like those of old women, their eyes big and glassy as their feet carried them away from the flames. Away from their friend.

She saw Jessica carve a ragged path across the playground, her arms flailing. She heard the screams, the thump of shoes against asphalt, the sizzle as the hair caught. She watched what she knew to be a child move like a thrown firework, skittering across a pavement. Slowing down, fizzing .. .

And she saw the face of a man, of Rooker, as he turned and jogged away down the slope. His legs moving faster and faster. Almost, but not quite, fal ing as he careered down the hil towards his car.

Carol Chamberlain turned and stared at the phone. She thought about the anonymous cal she had received twenty minutes earlier. The simple message from a man who could not possibly have been Gordon Rooker.

"I burned her .. ."

ONE

The train was stationary, somewhere between Golders Green and Hampstead, when the woman stepped into the carriage.