The Burning Girl

TWENTY-SIX

Chamberlain stood in the doorway watching Jack at the cooker. She loved her husband for his attention to detail and routine. He wore the same blue-striped apron whether he was making a casserole or knocking up cheese on toast. His movements were precise, the wooden spoon scraping out a rhythm against the bottom of the pan. He caught her looking at him and smiled. "About twenty minutes. All right, love?"

She nodded and walked slowly back into the living room. The paper on the walls came from English Heritage a reproduction of a Georgian design they'd had to save up to afford. The carpet was deep and spotless, the colour of red wine. She let herself drop back on to the perfectly plumped cushions and tried to remember that this was the sort of room she'd always dreamed of; the sort of room she'd imagined when she'd been sitting in dirty, smoke-filled boxes trying to drag the truth out of murderers.

She stared at the water colour above the fireplace, the over-elaborate frame suitably distressed. She'd pictured it or something very like it years before, while she'd stared at the photos of a victim; of the body parts from a variety of angles.

She pulled her stockinet feet under her and told herself that these walls she'd once coveted so much weren't closing in quite as quickly as they had been.

What had Thorne said?

"Billy Ryan. Jessica Clarke. You've got to let it go?"

She was trying, but her hands were sticky.

As it went, she knew that Ryan would quickly become little more than the name on a headstone.

She could keep on trying, but Jessica would always be with her. And the man who'd stood looking up at her bedroom window the flames dancing across the darkness of his face would become, if he were not actually the man who had burned Jessica, a man who they were never going to catch. In her mind, he was already the one who had touched the flame to a blue cotton skirt, all those years before. In the absence of cold, hard fact, imagination expanded to fill the spaces. It created truths all of its own.

Jack called through from the kitchen, "Shall we open a bottle of wine, love?"

Fuck it, Chamberlain thought.

"Sod it," she said. "Let's go mad." Thorne stared at the screen, his eyes itchy after an hour spent trawling the Net for useless rubbish. He wrote down the name of an actor he'd never heard of and reached for his coffee. His father had called while Thorne was still in Woolworth's, struggling to make a decision.

"I'm in trouble," Jim Thorne had said.

"What?"

Thorne must have sounded worried. The impatience on the face of the girl behind the till had been replaced, for a few seconds, by curiosity.

"Some items for lists I'm putting together, maybe for a.. thing. Bollocks. Thing people read, get in fucking libraries. A book. Other stuff, trivia questions driving me mental."

"Dad, can I talk to you about this in a few?"

"I was awake until three this morning trying to get some of these names. I've got a pen by the bed, you know, to jot things down. You saw it when you were here. Remember?"

Thorne had noticed that the girl on the till was staring at her watch. It was already five minutes after closing time and there were no other customers in the shop. He was still holding two different outfits in his arms, unable to decide between them.

He had smiled at the girl. "Sorry."

"Do you remember seeing the pen or not?" His father had started to shout.

The girl had nodded curtly towards the baby clothes Thorne was carrying. Her eyes had flicked across to an angry-looking individual standing by the doors, waiting to lock up.

"I'd better take both of them," Thorne had said. He'd handed over the clothes, returned to his father. "Yes, I remember the pen. It's a nice one."

His father had spat down the phone. "Last night the bloody thing was useless. Needs a.. new pen. Needs a new bit putting in. Fuck, you know, the thin bit with fresh ink you put in.. when the fucker runs out.."

"Refill."

"I need to go to a stationer's. There's a Ryman in the town." The girl had held out a hand. Thorne had put a twenty-pound note into it. "I'll call you when I get home, Dad, all right? I can go online later and get all the answers."

"Where are you now?"

"Woolworth's."

"Like the killer." his father had said.

"What?"

"It was the Woolworth's Killer who did Sutcliffe in Broadmoor. Remember? He'd killed the manager of a Woolworth's somewhere, which is how he got the name, and then, when him and the Ripper were inside together, he stabbed the evil fucker in the eye. With a pen, funnily enough. A fucking pen!"

"Dad."

"We got your bike from Woolworth's in 1973. Can't remember who did the Christmas advert that year. Always big stars doing the Woolies Christmas ads, you know TV stars, comedians, what have you. Always the same slogan. "That's the wonder of Woolworth's!" Fucking annoying tune went with it, an' all. I'll bet Peter bastard Sutcliffe wasn't singing that when the pen was going in and out of his eye." Then his father had started to sing. '"That's the wonder of Woolworth's."

The girl behind the counter had all but thrown Thorne's change at him. The security guard by the door had held the door wide and glared.

'".. that's the wonder of good old Woolies." Thorne had just listened.

He'd bought the computer cheaply the year before, stuck it on a table underneath the window in the living room. One of the old-model iMacs, it was 'snow' white when he'd bought it, but was now distinctly grubby. Thorne listened to the low hum from the monitor and thought about the inside of his father's head.

Did the words get lost somewhere between the brain and the mouth? If they made it out of the brain, did they just take a wrong turn? If his father could hear the word he wanted inside his head, if he could see it perfectly well, then the frustration must have been unbearable. He imagined his father as a tiny, impotent figure, raging inside his own skull. He imagined him standing next to a pair of enormous speakers that blared out the word he was unable to speak. Dwarfed by its illuminated letters, fifty feet high.

Swearing and shouting and a certain amount of public embarrassment under the circumstances, they were the very least you could expect. Jesus, Thorne was amazed his father hadn't smashed his own brains out against a wall. Bent down to finger the grey goo as it leaked from his head, and tried to pick those elusive words out of the soup. A new page was downloading. Thorne waited for a list to appear on the screen, then scribbled down the names of the ten tallest buildings in the world. He'd call his father in the morning, give him all the useless information he'd asked for.

"The Job can't see us getting too much more out of this." Thorne leaned back in his chair, cradled his coffee cup and thought about the team celebrating that night in the Oak. Tughan would have made a speech, rather more fulsome than the one he'd given in the office. They'd have drunk toasts to their results. Arms thrown around shoulders as they lifted glasses of lager and malt whisky, and drunk to lies. To what they'd been told to settle for.

He pictured other glasses being raised elsewhere, by those who really had something to celebrate. Those who would be extremely happy if they knew and there was every reason to think that they would know that for the time being the police were off their backs.

Thorne had only a mug of lukewarm coffee, but he raised it anyway. To some of the police.

He reached forward to turn the computer off but then paused. He typed 'immortal skin' into the search engine and waited. Eventually, a site appeared that gave all the details Ian Clarke had told him about. The page was dense with information, closely typed, difficult to read. Thorne's eyes closed and he dreamed for a few minutes, no more than that, of holes in flesh that healed. Of scars fading like the words written in sand, and of lines etched into skin that vanished; the X replaced by smooth, fresh flesh that smelled of babies. When he jolted awake, the screen had frozen. He swore at the computer for a few seconds, then pulled out the plug.

And went to bed.