Mark Billingham - The Burning Girl

"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.

Thorne waited nearly a week before going back to Green Lanes. He'd spent the days at work, going through the motions pushing paper around his desk as one case wound down and others moved up a gear. All the time he was weighing up everything he'd learned about what had been done and who should pay for it, and waiting in vain for something that might change the most depressing fact of all. There was nothing he could do… It was just after eleven-thirty on a warmish Thursday night. The cafe had not been closed very long when Thorne pressed his face against the glass in the door. He could just make out Arkan Zarif alone at a booth towards the back. He could see Zarif's daughter Sema moving back and forth behind the counter.

Thorne banged on the glass.

Zarif looked up, peered to see who it was. From outside, Thorne couldn't read the expression on the old man's face when he recognised who was at the door. Zarif nodded towards his daughter and the girl came from behind the counter, unlocked the door and held it open for Thorne without a word.

The main lights in the place had been turned off, but a number of the lanterns overhead were glowing: orange and red bleeding through coloured glass and slats in metal. There was music playing at a low level, a woman singing in Turkish. Thorne couldn't tell if she was in love or in despair.

Zarif held up his glass, shouted something to his daughter as Thorne approached his table. Thorne turned to the girl and shook his head. She moved back behind the rows of cups and glasses.

"No wine?" Zarif said. "Coffee then?" Thorne slid into the booth without answering.

For a few moments they studied each other, then Zarif emptied his wineglass. His hand seemed huge around the stem. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another.

"Merhaba, Baba," Thorne said. Hello. Zarif smiled and raised his glass. "Merhaba."

"We sat in here once and talked about what names meant, remember?" Zarif said nothing.

"We joked about how they can mean more than one thing. Like the word baba."

"The meaning of this word is simple," Zarif said.

"I know what it means, and I also know how it's used. I know the respect that it inspires back in Turkey. And the fear."

"Baba is "father", that's all."

"Father as in "head of the family", right? Father to your children, and to your friends, and to those who earn you money. Father to those who kill for you and father to those who you wouldn't think twice about having killed if it suited you."

"I look after my wife and children."

"Of course you do. You're just running a small family business while others are out with the guns and knives you put into their hands. How does it work, Baba? You run things until you croak or you're past it and then the boys take over?"

Zarif swilled wine around his mouth, then swallowed. "When business no longer interests me, I will retire. Now, things are still interesting. It's a good arrangement."

"It's a great arrangement. Memet and his brothers front it up, handle all the attention from the likes of me, while you're just the harmless old boy in the kitchen, chucking meat on the grill." Zarif folded his hands across his gut. He was wearing the same grubby, striped apron Thorne had seen the first time he'd come into the cafe.

"These days, I truly enjoy the cooking more than. other parts of my business. It's easy to be at the heart of things here. I'm in the kitchen, people know where I am."

It struck Thorne suddenly that Zarif's accent was less pronounced than when they'd spoken before. There was little, if any, groping for the right word. The act had been dropped.