then relaxed as he saw his older brother looming at Thorne's shoulder. Thorne took the scene in fast. The two other men at the table were Tan, the youngest brother, and the heavyset man he'd seen at the cafe with Hassan when he'd been in there with Holland. For a few seconds, the only noise was the muffled soundtrack from the TV in the waiting room and the bubbling of the air filter in a large tank of tropical fish sitting on an oak sideboard.
Thorne pointed to the table. The pile of crumpled five-and ten-pound notes in the middle was about to spill on to the carpet. 'I could make up a four for bridge if you fancy it,' he said.
Memet pushed past him and took the empty seat at the table. 'Just say what you've come to say.'
'It's funny, you talking back there about drivers. It reminds me: they found the driver of your lorry.'
Memet shrugged, looked confused. 'Our lorry?' Hassan leaned across and spoke to him in Turkish. Memet nodded.
'The police at Thames Valley called me about it yesterday morning,' Hassan said. He spoke to Memet and Tan as if he were filling them in on some minor business glitch. 'The lorry wasn't damaged, as far as they can tell, and the haulier will claim for their lost load, so I didn't think there was any need to contact our insurance company.' He looked up at Thorne. 'I haven't had the chance to talk to my brothers about it yet, but it's fairly trivial.'
'Pass on our gratitude to the officers who found it,' Memet said. Thorne had to concede that they played it well. 'It wasn't very trivial for the driver,' Thorne said. 'They found him with half his head missing.'
The heavyset man failed to conceal a smile. He looked down and began to tidy up the notes when he saw that Thorne had caught it. Hassan ran a hand back and forth across his prominent chin. The stubble rasped against his palm. 'Well, that clears one thing up at least,' he said. 'We can assume that the driver wasn't in league with the hijackers.'
Memet did a convincing enough job of looking shocked and saddened, though Thorne knew very well that the news would have come as something of a relief. A dead driver was a driver who wouldn't be telling the police anything. 'They killed him?' he said, turning to Hassan. 'For what? What was this lorry carrying?'
Playing it very well. Certainly far from stupid.
'I think the police said it was CD players,' Hassan said. Thorne corrected him. 'DVD players, actually. The good news is that they didn't get the entire load.'
The heavyset man carried on straightening banknotes, but now the three brothers looked directly at Thorne. Memet's face was a blank. Hassan was trying too hard to look no more than innocently curious. Tan was persevering with the hard man glare.
'That's right,' Thorne said. 'Apparently, a couple of the DVD players were shot, trying to run away.'
Only Memet Zarif was able to hold the look, to continue to meet Thorne's eye.
'Don't worry, I'll get straight in touch if we find any more,' Thorne said. 'Just thought you'd be interested in what we'd established so far.'
More bubbles from the fish tank. Voices from the TV along the corridor.
As Thorne turned to leave, he became aware of another figure seated in the corner to his right and a little behind him. He stared until the man leaned slowly forward and his face moved from shadow into light. Thorne recognised him as the son of Muslum and Hanya Izzigil. Thorne took a step towards the boy. 'Yusuf.' It may just have been the light, but the boy's eyes seemed changed. The previous month, with his parents dead in the next room, they had brimmed with tears, but that was not the only difference that Thorne could see. There was a challenge in their stillness, in their deadness, and in the set of the boy's shoulders as he stared at the man who'd failed so miserably to provide him with any justice. Clearly, there had been others who'd made him promises they had more chance of keeping.
'We are taking care of Yusuf now,' Hassan said. Thorne stared at the boy for a few seconds more, looking for a sign that some part of him might not yet have become theirs. He saw only that the boy was lost. He turned, and moved slowly back the way he'd come in. 'I'll let you get back to your game.'
'Are you sure you don't want that cab home?' Memet asked. Thorne said nothing, his back to them.
Tan Zarif spoke up for the first time. 'We'll do you a very good price,' he said. 'Green Lanes to Kentish Town for a fiver. How's that sound?'
Thorne felt something tighten in his gut at the revelation implicit in the simple details of the journey. He turned and looked deep into Tan's eyes, trying to swallow back the panic and sound casual. 'I thought we'd talked about this,' he said. 'Drop the 'we know where you live' hard man shit or change the look.' He drew a finger from ear to ear along the line of his jaw, the same line marked out on Tan by his pencil-thin beard. 'The George Michael thing is scaring nobody.' Thorne took a deep breath and held it as he walked quickly back along the corridor, through the empty reception area and out on to the street. He let the breath out and turned to see Arkan Zarif staring at him from the doorway of the cafe.
The old man raised his hand as Thorne came towards him, brought it up to his mouth. 'You come inside for coffee? For suklak, maybe?' Thorne slowed his pace, but kept on heading towards his car. 'I can't. I've got to be somewhere.'
It was true that he had less than an hour to get home, shower and change, but that wasn't the only reason why he'd refused the old man's invitation. Even if he'd had the time, Thorne knew that the coffee would have tasted even more bitter than usual.
When he thought about the burning girl, he often thought about the others, too. About her friends.
They'd been the first to see it, of course, to spot the flames. The one who had been standing closest, the one who really was Alison Kelly, screamed like it had been her who was on fire. He'd jumped slightly, perhaps even cried out as the scream had moved through him like a blade. He'd turned his head towards the noise then, and seen the flames reflected in the girl's eyes. They were dark brown and very wide, and the flames that were growing, that were climbing up the girl who was actually burning, seemed tiny, dancing in her friend's eyes in that second before he'd turned and run. He still remembered how small they had seemed, flickering against the dark brown. How far away. As he'd rushed away down that steep hill, careering towards the car, that scream had followed him. He could feel the echo of it at his back, rolling down the hillside after him, all but knocking him off his feet as he went. Then the screams had grown, of course, louder and more hysterical, pushing him downhill even faster. He'd stood still for just a second or two before jumping into the car, and he remembered that moment now vividly. Remembered the shortness of breath and the picture on the backs of his eyelids. He'd closed his eyes and the shape of the flames had still been there, imprinted. Gold and red edges bleeding into the blackness.
A snapshot of the flames. The ones he'd seen jumping in the eyes of the girl he'd been sent there to kill.
SEVENTEEN
'How did you get my number, anyway?' Thorne asked. Alison Kelly put down her glass, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. 'On your card?'
Thorne smiled and shook his head. Like everyone else on the job, he had a generic Metropolitan Police business card. It gave the address of Becke House, together with the phone and fax numbers at the office. It bore the legend 'Working for a safer London', printed in blue as a jaunty scribble. It left a space to write in mobile, pager or other numbers.
'I never write down my home phone number,' Thorne said. 'You didn't get it out of the phone book, either.'
She still wasn't giving anything away.
'You got my number the same way you found out everything else, right?'
They were sitting in a corner of the Spice of Life at Cambridge Circus. Alison nursed a large gin and tonic. Thorne was on the Guinness, and enjoying it. The lounge contained acres of red velvet, far too many brass rails and, inexplicably, was crammed with annoyingly healthy-looking Scandinavian tourists.
Thorne tore open a packet of crisps, grabbed a handful. 'I'm not going to get a straight answer, am I?'
'I was a gangster's daughter until I was fourteen,' she said. 'Then everything changed. Everything. Dad walked away from it all and took us and a great big bag of his tasteless 'new' money with him. Spent the rest of his life playing golf and doing crosswords in his conservatory. A couple of years later, Billy and I were together, but once that marriage was over, I was completely out of it. I was out of the life, and that's how I wanted it. Gangland was just something Mum and I saw on the TV, and I was just a lowly legal secretary with a Page 129 billingham,
