known who he was.
'Tom?'
Everything had been built upon the belief, his belief that Rooker had been innocent. Wasn't it him that had put the pressure on Rooker in the first place, forced him to admit that he wasn't the one?
Chamberlain had raised the iron and stood looking at him, waiting for something. Guidance, perhaps.
The vast, dreadful stone of his own stupidity crashed onto the floor of Thorne's gut. Its weight exactly equaled the elation of knowing, of finally getting the name. He felt hollow and bloated; cancelled out.
Almost every single thing that Rooker had told them was true. He'd only changed one, tiny fact. When Billy Ryan had asked him to kill Alison Kelly, he'd said yes.
'He was perfect.'
Chamberlain still hadn't got it. 'What?' Rooker had almost certainly been involved in the earlier attempt to get rid of Kevin Kelly. Billy Ryan, as Kelly's number two, had a very good reason to want Rooker dead. It made him the ideal choice to carry out a contract on Kelly's daughter.
'Maybe Ryan offered to lift a contract he had out on Rooker,' Thorne said. 'In return for Rooker doing him one small favour.' Chamberlain looked unconvinced, but it didn't really matter either way. What was beyond dispute was Rooker's fear of Billy Ryan, a fear based on the knowledge that Ryan did not forgive those who fucked up. It had driven Rooker to confess, to condemn himself to prison and to a life spent with only the fear itself for company. It grew with every attack, with every beating in the showers, until it dictated everything Rooker did. Fear was what drove him. It was what eventually gave shape to a scheme that might protect him when he finally came to start life again outside prison.
Which he would be doing just a few days from now. Thorne decided that Brookhouse could kick as much as he wanted. He swung his legs around and slid off the bed. 'What's Rooker's arrangement with Memet Zarif?'
Again something flashed in Brookhouse's eyes. This time, there was no mistaking genuine terror.
'A lot more scared of Memet than he is of us,' Chamberlain said. Thorne watched Brookhouse's eyes dart to meet his own. He saw the tears begin. He saw the hope that their meaning might not be understood. Thorne began to suspect that he may have been wrong about which of the Zarif brothers was pulling the strings.
'Not Memet?' Thorne asked.
There was a moan which seemed to come from Brookhouse's belly as he started to thrash around on the bed.
'Hassan?'
Thorne repeated the name, raising his voice over the noise Brookhouse was making to blank him out. There was still no response. Thorne nodded to Chamberlain, who moved the iron back into position. 'Who is it, Wayne?'
As the iron descended again towards his chest, Brookhouse gradually began to grow still. The sobbing died away, his body stiffened and his eyes closed tight shut. It was clear that he was waiting for the pain, that he was prepared for it.
Something. someone frightened him a lot more. Chamberlain held the iron an inch above his chest. Thorne watched the skin begin to redden, saw the translucent edges of blisters gaining definition.
'Looks like you're happy to let us get on with this, Wayne,' Thorne said. 'Maybe we should just go down to the station. You might be less happy about going to prison for attempted murder.' Brookhouse gasped out his words on snatched breaths. 'The girl at the bus stop was just for show. So the deal would happen. I was never going to do it.'
'It's not much of a defence.'
'Doesn't matter, does it?' Brookhouse opened his eyes. He looked, glassy-eyed, at the edge of the iron, then up at Thorne. 'We're not going to the station, are we?'
Thorne stared back at him. Terrified as he was, Brookhouse knew very well that this was never going to get as far as paperwork.
'You're right, we're not.' Thorne turned to Chamberlain. 'Burn him.'
The flippancy with which Thorne had issued the instruction was in stark contrast to the way he felt. It was as if the blood were poised to explode from beneath every inch of his skin. The tendons in his neck felt ready to snap, and things had stirred, and begun to jump and slither in his stomach.
Burn him.
The pair of them had struggled to overpower Brookhouse, to drag him through to the bedroom and tie him down. Since that moment, Thorne had stood outside himself, impotent as he'd followed Carol Chamberlain further into the shadows. She'd told him to fetch the iron and he'd done it. He'd watched her weighing up ends and means in an instant of rage, and her decision had taken him with it. He'd been borne along with her, exhilarated and appalled, deferring to something far beyond a rank that had been long since taken from her.
He watched the steam drifting from beneath the iron like the breath of funeral horses. He listened to the scrape of the handcuffs against the metal rail as Brookhouse strained against his bonds.
'Get a towel under him,' Chamberlain said. 'When there's contact he'll probably piss himself.'
Thorne was not sure if this was a simple practicality or a last attempt to scare Brookhouse into talking. He looked into Chamberlain's eyes and knew one thing: if he didn't talk, she was going to press a hot iron on to his chest.
Brookhouse said nothing.
The iron moved towards the scarlet skin in slow motion. Chamberlain had obviously reached the point where she thought she had nothing left to lose. Thorne watched her about to torture a man, and tried to decide if what he had was worth holding on to. There was scarcely any air between metal and flesh. Thorne knew that the sound and the smell of it could be no more than a moment away. He tried to speak, but once more he'd become as his father was. The words 'no' and 'stop' refused to come. He heard the hairs on Brookhouse's chest begin to crackle. He put out a hand.
'Carol.'
Brookhouse screamed hard and sucked in his chest, then screamed louder still as the mattress pushed him back up again, into the steaming base of the iron.
Chamberlain moved as if hers was the skin kissed by hot metal, and when she and Thorne had finished shouting, they could only stand still, pale and stiff as corpses, looking away while Brookhouse sobbed and spat bubbles of nonsense.
'Ba. ba.'
Thorne listened to Brookhouse's gibberish. He watched him kick a leg, slowly, as Holland's baby had done.
'Ba. ba. ba.'
Thorne looked across the bed at Chamberlain. He was unable to tell if the horror on her face was at what she had done with the iron or at something she could see stuck to the flat of it. It was perhaps an hour after Wayne Brookhouse had gone. The two of them were sitting in darkness, unable to drink fast enough when the word suddenly danced into Thorne's head.
'What are we going to do about Rooker?' Chamberlain asked. 'With what that fucker did to Jessica? We can't let him come out.' Thorne wasn't paying much attention. He was trying to place a word, recalling precisely where he'd seen it on a page. No, on a screen.
Brookhouse had not been talking nonsense at all. Thorne had seen the word a month or so before on the NCIS website. On a night when he'd been unable to sleep, when he'd sat at his computer and absorbed the miserable realities of human trafficking. That same night he'd trawled through pages of information about organised crime in the UK and in Turkey. He'd speed-read dense blocks of text about the set-up of Turkish gangs, the customs and the hierarchies of the most powerful families in Ankara and Istanbul. A word that looked to English eyes as though it should mean baby or child and meant exactly the opposite.
'Tom? What about Rooker?'
Baba.
Thorne felt it where the hairline brushed the nape of his neck. He knew that Gordon Rooker was not the only person he'd misjudged.
