could live with it. A release date, in black and white, was all the certainty he needed.
He bought books, dozens of them: spy thrillers and biographies. He'd learned to lose himself in them and looked forward to choosing his own.
He bought a season ticket at Upton Park. Wherever he ended up, he'd sneak back now and again to watch his grandson play. And he bought himself a woman. Inside, you developed strong wrists, but cash handed over to lie back and watch a tart doing the work could only be money well spent.
In his cell, Rooker drifted towards sleep thinking about big, soft beds, and about flesh beneath his fingers that was not his own.
THIRTY-ONE
Thorne hadn't known Wayne Brookhouse for long, of course, but this was definitely a look he'd not seen before. The eyes bulged. The face seemed stiff and yellow as old newspaper.
Thorne knew Chamberlain's features far better, but they were distorted by an expression that to him was equally as strange.
'This is 50… fucking out of order,' Brookhouse said. He panted out the words, his head twisting from side to side, the bed shaking as he fought against his restraints.
One wrist was cuffed to the metal bedstead, the other lashed to it with a black tie which Thorne normally only dug out for funerals. Thorne was sitting across his prisoner's legs, holding tight to the rail at the foot of the bed to avoid being pitched off as Brookhouse struggled and bucked.
Chamberlain finished unbuttoning Brookhouse's shirt and reached towards the bedside table. The appliance she picked up was plugged into a red extension reel, which in turn ran to a socket in the corner of the room. She flicked the cable aside as she took a step towards the head of the bed. 'It's funny,' she said, 'because, normally, I bloody hate ironing.'
Brookhouse spat out a string of curses. He was doing his very best to appear unafraid, to make the fear look like rage, and he wasn't making a bad job of it. Maybe it would have been harder to disguise if Thorne had been holding the iron. Perhaps, much as he was struggling, Brookhouse found the sight of a woman in her mid-fifties playing amateur-hour torturer faintly ridiculous.
To Thorne, the only ridiculous thing was that Brookhouse wasn't a damn sight more scared. Thorne could see something in Carol Chamberlain's eyes that he'd never seen before. Or maybe something that was usually there was missing.
'Tell us about the X-Man,' Thorne said. Brookhouse screwed his eyes shut. 'I can't.' Chamberlain lowered her arm. The face of the iron was no more than six inches above Brookhouse's chest. 'This is heavy,' she said. Thorne stared at Chamberlain. They were bus king this. He couldn't tell whether she meant it, so Brookhouse certainly couldn't. 'Come on, Wayne.'
Brookhouse winced. It was obvious, though the iron was not touching him, that he was starting to feel its heat. 'He's gone, he's gone.' He began to shout, to gabble his words. 'He got out of the country. All right?'
'Where?' Thorne asked.
'I don't fucking know, I swear. Serbia, maybe. I think he was a Serb.'
'Give me a name.'
'I don't know his name, I never met him.' He tensed as the iron dropped another inch. 'Look, I saw him in the cafe once, that's all. He was just sitting on his own in the corner, smiling. Dark hair, you know, same as they all fucking look. Smile like a film star, loads of fucking teeth, I remember that.'
Thorne remembered the man in the car outside his flat. He remembered that smile. He wondered how close he'd come to feeling a blade against his back; the brightness of its edge, teasing before the blackness of the bullet.
'When did he leave, Wayne?'
'A while ago. A few weeks after he did the last one. After the copper.'
Moloney.
So, Thorne had been wrong about Billy Ryan having Marcus Moloney killed. It had been Memet Zarif who had ordered the killing, without realising he was targeting an undercover officer. The murder of Moloney had, in Thorne's mind, been one more thing Ryan had paid for with his own death. One more thing that had justified Thorne telling Alison Kelly what he'd told her. Now, Thorne had to take Moloney's death off that list, but it didn't make much difference. There were still plenty of things Billy Ryan had needed to pay for… 'If he's gone,' Thorne said, 'who put the 'X' on my door?'
'It could have been anyone.' The sweat left a stain on Thorne's sheets when Brookhouse turned his head. 'It was just to put the shits up you a bit, that's all.'
'Who ordered the killings?' Chamberlain asked. 'Was it Memet?' Brookhouse shook his head.
'Is that a 'no'?' Chamberlain moved the iron to her left hand, shook out the right for a few seconds, then moved it back. 'Or a 'no comment'?'
Thorne steadied himself as Brookhouse's knees jerked up into his backside. He rode out the struggle, thinking about the dead and about those who had taken money to arrange their deaths. Those for whom knives and guns were the tools of their trade: the butcher who had murdered Mickey Clayton, Marcus Moloney and the others; the man who had shot Muslum and Hanya Izzigil; whoever who had gunned down Francis Cullen and the two still unidentified immigrants who had been dragged from the back of his lorry and had tried to run for their lives. Page
The men who'd got away with it.
Like a man whose tools had been a naked flame, and a can of lighter fuel.
Thorne looked at Brookhouse, wondering just how close he might have got to Gordon Rooker. Rooker probably trusted him a damn sight more than he'd ever trust a police officer. Thorne asked himself how much Rooker might have had to reveal, how much he'd had to give up before his arrangements with Memet Zarif were finalised. It couldn't hurt to ask.
'Who burned Jessica Clarke, Wayne?'
Thorne saw something flicker, just for a second, in Brookhouse's eyes. A spark of something, that he immediately did his best to hide, like a small boy caught stealing and jamming the booty far down into his pocket. Thorne glanced at Chamberlain and knew immediately that she'd seen it, too.
'You know, don't you?' she said.
Thorne watched as Chamberlain let the iron fall a little further. He could see the tendons stretching on the inside of her forearm as she took the weight of it, the concentration on her face as she moved it, as slowly as she could.
'You won't.' Brookhouse said.
Thorne watched, compelled, as Chamberlain reached down and turned the dial on the iron to its highest setting. A drop of water fell from it on to Brookhouse's chest. He flinched as if it were boiling.
'You're imagining the pain as something quick,' Chamberlain said. 'A moment of agony as I press the iron down and then release it. Just a second or two of hissing and then it's over, right? OK, I want you to think about how it would be if I let the iron go. If I just left it sitting there on your chest. Sizzling on your chest, Wayne. How long do you think it would take to start sinking in?' When Brookhouse took his eyes from the iron and looked at Chamberlain's face he started to talk. 'Jesus, how fucking thick are you people?
There was no other man. There was only me, pretending to be him.'
'Pretending to be the man who really burned Jessica?'
'Him. Rooker. Rooker was the man.'
And Thorne could see it: bright as a flame and certain as a scar. In the walk and in the fucking wink of him, and in the cunt's fingers moving through his greasy, yellow hair. In the tongue that slid across a gold tooth and in that sly smile before Gordon Rooker bent to snap the lid from his tobacco tin… Thorne had known from the moment he'd recognised Brookhouse that Rooker had been lying. But not about this. It was obvious that Brookhouse couldn't have burned Jessica, but Thorne had never presumed that the man making the calls the man on Chamberlain's front lawn had been the real attacker. He'd always thought that there was someone else, and that Rooker had probably
