been managing. The practical difficulties with keys and with mail and with money; the disorientation over time and place; the obsession with trivia; the complete lack of judgment about what to wear, and when to wear it; the drugs for depression, for mood swings, for the verbally abusive behaviour. Still, his father hadn't wandered away and fallen into a ditch yet. He hadn't started knocking back bleach like it was lemonade. He hadn't endangered himself. Until now.
'You know you're supposed to stay out of the kitchen,' Thorne said. Then came the two words the old man seemed to say most often these days. His catch phrase he called it, in his better moods. Two words spat out or dribbled, sobbed or screamed, but mostly mumbled, through teeth grinding together in frustration: 'I forgot.'
'I know, and you forgot to turn the cooker off. The rules are there for a good reason, you know? What happens if you forget that knives are sharp? Or that toasters and water aren't meant to go together?'
His father looked up suddenly, excitement spreading across his face as he latched on to a thought. 'More people die in their own homes than anywhere else,' he said. 'Nearly five thousand people a year die because of accidents in the home and garden. I read it. More in the living room than in the kitchen, as a matter of fact, which I thought was surprising.'
'Dad.' Thorne watched as concentration etched itself into his father's features and he began to count off on his fingers and thumbs.
'Falls are top of the list, if I remember rightly. 'Impact accidents', they're called. Electrocution's another good one. Fire, obviously. Choking, suffocation, DIY incidents.'
'Why didn't you give them my number to call?' His father continued to count off, but began mouthing the words silently. After half a minute or so he stopped, and went back to poking about among the coils and circuits scattered across the table. Thorne watched him for a while. 'I'll stay the night,' he said. The old man grinned and got to his feet. He reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled five-pound note. He held it out, waved it at Thorne. 'Here you go. Here's some. bugger.' He closed his eyes, struggling to find the word. 'A piece of the stuff people buy things with.'
'What do I want money for?'
'Money!'
'What do I want it for?'
'To nip down the road and get us some chips. I still haven't had my fucking dinner yet.'
He lay awake in the dark, thinking about the burning girl. He'd never really stopped thinking about her, for one reason or another, not for any significant length of time, but lately, for obvious reasons, she'd been on his mind a great deal. The colours and the smells, which had understandably faded over the years, were suddenly more vivid, more pungent than they had been at any time since it had all happened. Not that he'd had much more than a second or two back then to take it all in. Once the flames had taken hold, he'd had to be away sharpish, down that hill towards the spot where he'd parked the car. He'd moved almost as quickly as the girl herself. The rest of it the girl's face and what have you had been filled in afterwards. He'd seen it, swathed in bandages, splashed across every front page and every television screen. Later, he'd seen what she looked like with the bandages off; it was impossible to tell how her face had been before.
It was funny, he thought. Ironic. If he had seen her face that day at the playground, he would have realised she wasn't the one. Afterwards, of course, nobody would mistake her for anyone else ever again. He drifted, eventually, towards sleep. Thoughts giving way to fuzzy pictures and feelings.
He remembered her arms flailing in the instant before she began to run, as though it were nothing more serious than a wasp. He remembered the sound of her shoes on the playground as he turned away. He remembered feeling like such a fucking idiot when he realised she was entirely the wrong girl.
Thorne spent most of the night writhing across nylon sheets, sinking into the ludicrously soft mattress in his father's spare room and dragging back the duvet which had slid away from him down the natural slope of the bed. He felt like he'd only just got off to sleep when his phone rang. He checked his watch and saw that it was already gone nine-thirty. At the same instant that he began to panic, he remembered that he'd called Brigstocke the night before to tell him what was going on. They wouldn't be expecting him at the office. He reached down towards where the phone lay chirping on top of his clothes. His neck ached and his arms were freezing. It was Holland. 'I'm in a video shop in Wood Green,' he said. 'We've got two bodies, still warm. And that's not the title of one of the videos.'
FOUR
The uniformed constable who'd been first on the scene was sitting at a small table in a back room, next to a teenage boy whom Thorne guessed was Muslum Izzigil's son. Thorne stared across at them from the doorway. He couldn't decide which of the two looked the younger, or the most upset.
Holland stood at Thorne's shoulder. 'The boy ran out into the street when he found them. Constable Terry was having breakfast in the cafe opposite. He heard the boy screaming.'
Thorne nodded and closed the door quietly. He turned and moved back into the shop, where screens had been hastily erected around the bodies. The scene of crime team moved with a practised efficiency, but it seemed to Thorne that the usual banter, the dark humour, the craze -was a little muted. Thorne had hunted serial killers; he had known the atmosphere at crime scenes to be charged with respect, even fear, at the presentation, the offering up, of the latest victim. This was not what they were looking at now. This was almost certainly a contract killing. Still, there was an odd feeling in the room. Perhaps it was the fact that there were two bodies. That they had been husband and wife.
'Where was the boy when it happened?'
'Upstairs,' Holland said. 'Getting ready for school. He didn't hear anything.'
Thorne nodded. The killer had used a silencer. 'This one's a little less showy than the X-Man,' he said.
Muslum Izzigil was sitting against the wall between a display of children's videos and a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Lara Croft. His head was cocked to one side, his eyes half-open and popping. A thin line of blood ran from the back of his head, along freshly shaved jowls, soaking pink into the collar of a white nylon shirt. The body of his wife lay, face downwards, across his legs. There was very little blood, and only the small, blackened hole behind her ear told the story of what had happened. Or at least, some of it… Which one had he killed first? Did he make the husband watch while his wife was executed? Did the wife die only because she had tried to save her husband?
Thorne looked up from the bodies. He noticed the small camera in the corner of the shop. 'Too much to hope for, I suppose?'
'Far too much,' Holland said. 'The recorder's not exactly hard to find. It's over there underneath the counter. The shooter took the tape with him.'
'One to show the grandchildren.'
Holland knelt and pointed with a biro to the back of the dead woman's neck. 'Twenty-two, d'you reckon?'
Thorne could see where the blood was gathering then. It encircled her neck like a delicate necklace, but it was pooling, sticky between her chin and the industrial grey carpet. 'Looks like it,' he said. He was already moving across the shop towards the back room. Towards what was going to be a difficult conversation.
Constable Terry got to his feet when Thorne came through the door. Thorne waved him back on to his chair. 'What's the boy's name?' The boy answered the question himself: 'Yusuf Izzigil.'
Thorne put him at about seventeen. Probably taking A levels. He'd gelled his short, black hair into spikes and was making a decent enough job of growing a moustache. The hysteria which Holland had mentioned, which had first alerted the police, had given way to a stillness. He was quiet now, and seemingly composed, but the tears were still coming just as quickly, each one pushed firmly away with the heel of a hand the instant it brimmed and began. to fall.
He started to speak again, without being asked. 'I was getting ready upstairs. My father always came down just after eight o'clock, to deal with the tapes that had been returned in the overnight box. My mother came down to help him get things set up once she'd put the breakfast things away.' He spoke well, and slowly, with no trace of an accent. Thorne realised suddenly that the maroon sweater and grey trousers were a uniform, and guessed that the boy went to a private school.
