The Burning Girl-4 Read Free Page B

giggling. "Or Yakuza? We know our hit man's not black or Japanese .. ."
    A witness claimed to have seen the kil er leaving the scene of the third murder and had given a vague description of a white male in his thirties. The witness, Marcus Moloney, was an
    'associate' of the Ryan family, and not what you'd cal an upright citizen, but he seemed pretty sure about what he'd seen.
    "It's not that simple," Thorne said. "It might have been, ten years ago, when people stuck to their own, but now they don't care so much and the freelancers just go where the work is. The Triads use Yardies. Yardies work with the Russians. They nicked a gang of Yakuza last year for recruiting outside schools. They were as good as giving out application forms; signing up Greek lads, Asians, Turks, whoever."
    Hendricks smiled. "It's nice to see that they're al equal-opportunities employers .. ."
    Thorne grunted, and the two of them settled back into saying nothing for a few minutes. Thorne closed his eyes and picked at the goatee he'd grown towards the end of the previous year. The beard created the il usion of a jawline and covered up the scar from a knife wound.
    The puckered line that ran diagonal y across Thorne's chin was the only visible reminder of a night six months before when he'd both begged for his life and prayed for death to come quickly. There were other scars, easier to disguise, but far more troublesome. Thorne would reach into his gut in the darkness and finger them until they reopened into wounds. He could imagine the scab forming then, blood black across the tender flesh. The crust that would itch and crumble beneath his fingernails, exquisite and agonising, for him to poke and pick at...
    Lucinda Wil iams sang softly about an al -consuming lust, her voice sweet and saw-toothed at the same time, rising like smoke above a single acoustic guitar.
    Thorne and Hendricks both started slightly when the phone rang.
    "Tom?" A woman's voice.
    Thorne sank back into his armchair with the phone. He shouted across to Hendricks deliberately loud enough for the cal er to hear, "Oh Christ, it's that mad old woman who keeps phoning me up .. ."
    Hendricks grinned and shouted back, "Tel her I can smel the cat food from here!"
    "Come on then, Carol," Thorne said. "Tel me what's been happening in glamorous Worthing. Any "cat stuck up tree" incidents or Zimmer-frame pile-ups I should know about?"
    The woman on the other end of the line was in no mood for the usual banter. "I need to talk to you, Tom. I need you to listen .. ."
    So, Thorne listened. The curry arrived and went cold, but he didn't even think about it. He could tel as soon as she started to talk that something was seriously wrong.
    In al the time he'd known Carol Chamberlain, Thorne had never heard her cry before.
    TWO
    "I presume you tried 1471 .. .?"
    She raised her eyebrows. Asked if he thought she was a complete idiot.
    Thorne shrugged an apology.
    When he had first met Carol Chamberlain the previous year, he had taken her for a frumpy, middle-aged woman with too much time on her hands; a frumpy, middle-aged woman he had mistakenly assumed to be the mother of one of his constables.
    She stil claimed not to have forgiven him.
    Ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain had arrived in Thorne's office on a humid July morning seven months earlier, and turned the hunt for a sadistic rapist and kil er on its head. She was a member of what had become known as the Crinkly Squad a unit made up of former officers brought out of retirement to work on cold cases. Chamberlain hadn't needed a great deal of persuading to come back. Having done her thirty years, she'd been forced out of the Met to her way of thinking at least prematurely, and felt, at fifty-five, that she stil had a good deal to offer. The first case she'd worked on had thrown up information that had changed the course of Thorne's investigation, and it would turn out later, his life. The cold case now anything but cold had quickly been taken away from her,