but. Whatever the place was like, that smell would tell you where you were with a sack over your head. Thorne could sniff it up and name its constituent parts like a connoisseur: stale cigarette smoke, sweat and desperation.
He looked around. This one had a bit of everything a fresh coat of magnolia, the fumes charged up by the heat coming off radiators a foot thick. There was a snazzy new system of coloured chairs. Blue for visitors, red for inmates.
Most chairs were occupied, but a few red ones remained vacant. A black woman in the next row but one glanced across at him. The seat opposite her was empty. She smiled nervously, her eyes crinkling behind thick glasses, and then looked away before Thorne had a chance to smile back. He watched the woman beam as a young man her son, Thorne guessed swaggered towards her. The man grinned, then checked himself slightly, looked around to see if anyone had noticed him drop his guard. Thorne checked his watch: just before ten. He needed to get this over with as quickly as possible and get back to the office. He'd called DC
Dave Holland earlier, on his way west across London, towards HMP Park Royal… 'I need you to cover for me,' he'd said. 'Tell Tughan I'm off seeing a snout, or that I'm following up a hunch, or whatever. You know, some 'copper' bollocks.'
'Do I get to know what you're really doing?'
'I'm doing someone a favour. I should be back by lunchtime if the traffic's all right, so.'
'Are you driving? When did you get the car back?' Thorne knew what was coming. He was stupid to have let it slip. 'I got it back late yesterday,' he'd said.
The car in question, a pulsar-yellow BMW, was thirty years old, and Thorne had parted with a good deal of money for it the year before. Thorne thought it was a classic. Others preferred the term 'antique'. Holland, in particular, never missed an opportunity to take the piss, having maintained from the moment he'd seen it that the car was a big mistake. He'd gone to town when it had spectacularly failed its MOT and disappeared into the garage a fortnight earlier.
'How much?' Holland had asked, gleeful. Thorne had cursed as he'd caught a red light. He'd yanked up the hand brake 'It's an old car, all right? The parts are expensive.' Not only were they expensive, but there seemed to be a great many of them. Thorne couldn't remember them all, but he could recall the growing feeling of despair as they were cheerfully reeled off to him. For all Thorne knew about what was going on under the bonnet, the mechanic might just as well have been speaking Serbo-Croat.
'Five hundred?' Holland had said. 'More?'
'Listen, she's old, but she's still gorgeous. Like one of those actresses that's knocking on, but still tasty, you know?' As the car was a BMW, Thorne had tried to come up with a German actress who would fit the bill. He had failed. Felicity Kendal, he'd said as he pulled away from the lights. Yeah, that'll do.
'She?' Holland had sounded hugely amused.
'She's like Felicity Kendal.'
'People who call their car 'she' are one step away from a pair of string-back driving gloves and a pipe.' At the noise of the chair opposite him being scraped backwards, Thorne looked up and saw Gordon Rooker dropping on to the red seat. Thorne had never seen a picture, or been given a description, but there was no mistaking him.
'Anyone sitting here?' asked Rooker, a gold tooth evident as he smiled.
He was sixty, give or take a year or two, and tall. His face was thin and freshly shaved. The skin hung, leathery and loose, from his neck, and a full head of white hair had yellowed above the forehead with a lifetime's fags.
Thorne nodded towards the green bib that Rooker wore, that all the prisoners wore on top of the regulation blue sweatshirts. 'Very fetching,' he said.
'We've all got to wear these now,' Rooker said. 'A few places have had them for ages, but a lot of governors, including the one here, thought they were demeaning to the prisoners, which is all very splendid and progressive of them. Then a lifer in Gartree swaps places with his twin brother when nobody's looking and walks out through the front door. So, now it has to be obvious who's the prisoner and who isn't, and we all have to dress like prize prats when we have visitors. You think I'm making this up, don't you?'
The voice was expressive and lively. The voice of a pub philosopher or comedian, nicely weathered by decades on forty roll-ups a day. While Rooker was speaking, Thorne had taken out his warrant card. He slid it across the table. Rooker didn't bother to look at it.
'What do you want, Mr. Thorne?' He held up a hand. 'No, don't bother, let's just have a natter. I'm sure you'll get round to it eventually.'
'I'm a friend of Carol Chamberlain.'
Rooker narrowed his eyes.
'She'd've been Carol Manley when you knew her.' The gold tooth came slowly into view again. 'Did that woman ever make commissioner? I always reckoned she had it in her.' Thorne shook his head. 'She was a DCI when she retired. That was seven or eight years ago.'
'She was a decent sort, you know?' Rooker looked away, remembering something. His eyes slid back to Thorne. 'I'm not surprised she got married; she was a good-looking woman. Still fit, is she? Is she a game old bird?' He leaned across the table. 'Do you like 'em a bit older?'
Whether the suggestive comments were an attempt to unsettle or to bond, Thorne ignored them. 'She's being bothered. Some lunatic is sending letters and making calls.'
'I'm sorry to hear that.'
'Whoever he is, he claims to be the person responsible for the attempted murder of Jessica Clarke.' Thorne looked hard at Rooker, studied his face for a reaction. 'He reckons he was the one who burned her, Gordon.'
There was a reaction, no question, but Thorne had no idea what Rooker was so amused about.
'Funny?' Thorne asked.
'Pretty funny, yeah. Like I said, I'm sorry about Miss Manley, or whatever she's called now, being bothered, but it's a laugh when you get your own personal nutter, isn't it? It's taken him long enough, mind you, whoever he is.'
'You're telling me you don't know who this person is?' Rooker turned up his palms, tucked them behind his bib. 'Not a fucking clue.'
If he'd been asked at that instant to put money on whether Rooker was telling the truth, Thorne would happily have stumped up a few quid.
'I've had plenty of letters over the years,' Rooker continued, grinning. 'You know, the ones in green ink where they've pressed so hard that the pen's gone through the paper. People who want me to tell them stuff, so they can have a wank over it or whatever. I've had a few mad women and what have you, writing steamy letters, saying they want to marry me.'
A case the year before when Thorne had first encountered Carol Chamberlain had begun with just that sort of letter. It had not been genuine, but plenty were, and Thorne never ceased to be amazed, and sickened, by them. 'Well, Gordon, you're obviously quite a catch.'
'But this is different, right? This is sort of like a stalker in reverse. He can't stalk me, so he's stalking somebody else, somebody who was involved in it all, and he's pretending to be me. Pretending he did what I did.'
Thorne decided it was time to stop pissing about. 'So he is pretending then, is he? Because that's basically why I'm here. To make sure.' The cockiness, the ease, melted slowly back into the lines of Rooker's face. The shoulders drooped forward. The voice was low and level. Matter of fact.
'You can be sure. I set fire to that girl. That's basically why I'm here.'
For half a minute, Thorne watched Rooker stare down at the table-top. His scalp was visible, pink and flaking beneath the white hair. 'Like you said, though. He's waited a long time, this nutter. Why have you been here so long, Gordon?'
The animation returned. 'Ask the fucking judge. Miserable arse-hole's dead by now, if there's any justice.' He laughed, humourlessly, at his own joke. 'Like he'd know justice if it bit him in the bollocks.'
'It was a high-profile case,' Thorne said. 'You were always going to get sent down for a long one.'
'Listen, I wasn't expecting a slap on the wrists, all right? Look at what some of these bastards get away with now, though. Blokes who've carved up their wives are getting out after ten years. Less sometimes.'
Without an ounce of sympathy, knowing that he deserved every second he spent banged up, Thorne could
