'Jessica Clarke was my best friend. I was the one she got mistaken for.'
Thorne released her hand, slightly embarrassed at having held on to it for so long. She didn't seem overly bothered. 'Sorry, I know who you are. I just wasn't expecting you to walk in, or to… I just wasn't expecting you.'
'I probably should have called.'
They looked at each other for a second or two. Thorne could feel the eyes of the duty officer on them.
'Right, then.' What do you want? This would perhaps have been a little brusque, but it was all Thorne was thinking. Rather than ask the question, though, he looked around, as if searching for a place where they could talk in private. 'I'm sure I can find us somewhere where we can chat, or whatever.' He pointed to the exit. 'Unless you'd rather go for a walk or something?' She shook her head. 'It's bloody freezing out there.'
'Spring's not far away.'
'Thank God.'
Becke House was an operational HQ, as opposed to a fully functioning station, and, as such, it had no permanent interview suite. There was a small room to the right of the reception desk that was occasionally used in emergencies, or to store booze whenever a party was thrown. A table and chairs, a couple of rickety cupboards. Thorne opened the door, checked that the room was unoccupied and beckoned Alison Kelly inside.
'I'll see if I can organise some tea,' he said.
She moved past him and sat down, then began speaking before he'd closed the door. 'Here's what I know,' she said. Her voice was deep and unaccented. Just the right side of posh. 'You're not getting anywhere trying to find the man who squirted lighter fluid all over that girl in Swiss Cottage ten days ago.' She paused.
Thorne walked across to the table and sat down. 'I'm not quite sure what you're expecting me to say to that.'
'Three days before that happened, somebody tried to kill the man who's in prison for burning Jess, by stabbing him in the gut with a sharpened paintbrush. It's pretty obvious that there's a connection. Something's going on.'
'Do you mind me asking how you know all these things?' She gave a small shake of her head. More as if she couldn't be bothered to answer than as if she was actually refusing. Then she continued to demonstrate just how much she did know. 'Even if you weren't aware that the man who did the stabbing owed Billy Ryan a load of money, you'd have to be an idiot not to work out who was behind it.' She tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ear. 'Ryan was clearly responsible.'
'Clearly,' echoed Thorne.
'He wanted Rooker killed for the obvious reasons.' The obvious reasons. Thorne was relieved to discover that she didn't know absolutely everything.
'Though why he should choose now to get revenge for what Rooker did twenty years ago is anybody's guess.'
Thorne was disturbed and excited by the bizarre and abrupt conversation. He felt oddly afraid of this woman. Her attitude fascinated him, and pissed him off.
'You said, 'the man who's in prison for burning Jess'. That's a bit odd, don't you think? You didn't say, 'the man who burned Jess'. It just seems a strange way of putting it.'
She looked blankly at him.
'Have you got any reason to think that Gordon Rooker isn't the man responsible?' Thorne asked.
She couldn't conceal the half smile. 'There is something going on, isn't there?'
Thorne felt pretty sure he'd just walked into an elaborate verbal trap. There was clearly even more going on behind Alison Kelly's green eyes than he'd begun to suspect.
Now she wasn't even trying to hide the smile. 'That's the other thing I know,' she said. 'That you're not going to tell me anything.' The time for politeness had long since passed. 'What is it you want, Miss Kelly?' Thorne immediately saw the front for what it was, but only because he noticed it crack and slip a little: there was a softening around the jaw, and in the set of her shoulders.
'You aren't the only one who wasn't expecting me to walk in here,' she said. 'I needed a bloody big glass of wine before I drove up. I've been sitting in the pub opposite, surrounded by coppers, getting some Dutch courage.' The smile suddenly seemed nervous. The voice had lost any pretence at confidence or authority.
'I want to know what that girl did,' she said. 'What her friends did at that bus stop that saved her. I want to know what it was that alerted them. What it was that we didn't see, that we didn't do.'
'I really don't think there's much point.'
'The first thing I knew was when Jess ran at me, and I stepped out of the way. Do you understand that? All I could do was watch it, then.' Her voice was barely above a murmur, but it seemed to echo off the shiny white walls. 'I heard the crackle when it reached her hair. Then I smelled it. Have you ever smelled it? I mean, have you ever smelled anything like that?
'I wasn't actually sick. I felt like I was going to, like I was going to heave, but I didn't. Not then. Now, just the thought of it
… just the smell of a match being struck.' She looked, and sounded, disorientated. She was an adult in a playground. A child in a police station.
'That could have been my hair. Should have been my hair.' Thorne opened his mouth, but nothing came quickly enough. 'I want to know why Jess wasn't all right, like that other girl was. Why wasn't she? I want you to tell me what we could have done to save her.'
Thorne turned Eastenders up just enough to drown out the noise of Hendricks singing in the bathroom. He pulled Elvis on to his lap, flicked through the sports pages of the Standard folded across the arm of the sofa. He couldn't stop thinking about what Alison Kelly had said. He wasn't the only one who couldn't cope with ignorance. Alison Kelly's need for certainty sprang from something a little deeper seated than his own, though. There'd been plenty of things he would have done differently, given half a chance, but not too many bad things for which he felt responsible. She'd had twenty years of blame and guilt. Each had fed off yet perversely fattened the other, until they'd become the twin parasites that defined her. Thorne asked himself how much better off Alison Kelly really was, than the girl who'd been mistaken for her.
Elvis jumped away, grumbling, as Thorne stood up and walked across to the front door. He opened his bag and took out the small black book that had remained unopened since Ian Clarke had handed it to him. The dirge from the bathroom seemed, thankfully, to have abated. Thorne carried the diary back across to the sofa. He picked up the remote and muted the volume of the TV as he sat down again. When the pins and needles started, Chamberlain moved from the edge of the bath to the toilet seat. She turned her head so that she couldn't see herself in the mirror. It was half an hour since she'd come upstairs, and she wondered how much longer she was going to have to sit there before she stopped feeling like a silly old woman. She'd spent the weekend going over the cold case she was supposed to be working on for AMRU: a bookmaker, stabbed to death in a pub car park in 1993. A dead man and a family who deserved justice as much as anybody else, but Chamberlain was in no fit state to help them get it. She was finding it hard to care about anything about anything else.
The Jessica Clarke case had been one she'd been close to. As close as she had ever been to any case.
And she'd got it wrong.
Three nights earlier, on the last train home after the evening round at Tom Thorne's, she'd almost convinced herself that she was being stupid. What could she have done differently? Rooker had confessed, for heaven's sake. There was no earthly reason why they should ever have looked for anyone else.
Sitting on that all-but-deserted train, she'd almost convinced herself, but wrong was wrong, and it still hurt. She felt the pain of professional failure, and another, much worse pain, that comes from knowing you've let down someone very important.
Another train had begun rushing past, and she'd turned to watch. Her reflection had danced across the windows of the train as it flashed by. After it had gone, she'd stared at her face, floating in the darkness on the other side of the glass, and noticed that she was crying. The most painful thing, of course, was feeling useless. Being surplus to requirements. It was knowing that she'd got it wrong, and that she would play no part in putting it right again.
She'd heard the swish of the carriage door as it slid back, and watched the man moving towards her, reflected in the window. Watched as he'd weaved slowly back towards his seat with a bag from the buffet. Watched as he'd stopped at her table.
