She looked blankly at him.
"Have you got any reason to think that Gordon Rooker isn't the man responsible?" Thorne asked.
She couldn't conceal the half smile. "There is something going on, isn't there?"
Thorne felt pretty sure he'd just walked into an elaborate verbal trap. There was clearly even more going on behind Alison Kelly's green eyes than he'd begun to suspect.
Now she wasn't even trying to hide the smile. "That's the other thing I know," she said. "That you're not going to tell me anything." The time for politeness had long since passed. "What is it you want, Miss Kelly?" Thorne immediately saw the front for what it was, but only because he noticed it crack and slip a little: there was a softening around the jaw, and in the set of her shoulders.
"You aren't the only one who wasn't expecting me to walk in here," she said. "I needed a bloody big glass of wine before I drove up. I've been sitting in the pub opposite, surrounded by coppers, getting some Dutch courage." The smile suddenly seemed nervous. The voice had lost any pretence at confidence or authority.
"I want to know what that girl did," she said. "What her friends did at that bus stop that saved her. I want to know what it was that alerted them. What it was that we didn't see, that we didn't do."
"I really don't think there's much point."
"The first thing I knew was when Jess ran at me, and I stepped out of the way. Do you understand that? All I could do was watch it, then." Her voice was barely above a murmur, but it seemed to echo off the shiny white walls. "I heard the crackle when it reached her hair. Then I smelled it. Have you ever smelled it? I mean, have you ever smelled anything like that?
"I wasn't actually sick. I felt like I was going to, like I was going to heave, but I didn't. Not then. Now, just the thought of it
… just the smell of a match being struck." She looked, and sounded, disorientated. She was an adult in a playground. A child in a police station.
"That could have been my hair. Should have been my hair." Thorne opened his mouth, but nothing came quickly enough. "I want to know why Jess wasn't all right, like that other girl was. Why wasn't she? I want you to tell me what we could have done to save her."
Thorne turned Eastenders up just enough to drown out the noise of Hendricks singing in the bathroom. He pulled Elvis on to his lap, flicked through the sports pages of the Standard folded across the arm of the sofa. He couldn't stop thinking about what Alison Kelly had said. He wasn't the only one who couldn't cope with ignorance. Alison Kelly's need for certainty sprang from something a little deeper seated than his own, though. There'd been plenty of things he would have done differently, given half a chance, but not too many bad things for which he felt responsible. She'd had twenty years of blame and guilt. Each had fed off yet perversely fattened the other, until they'd become the twin parasites that defined her. Thorne asked himself how much better off Alison Kelly really was, than the girl who'd been mistaken for her.
Elvis jumped away, grumbling, as Thorne stood up and walked across to the front door. He opened his bag and took out the small black book that had remained unopened since Ian Clarke had handed it to him. The dirge from the bathroom seemed, thankfully, to have abated. Thorne carried the diary back across to the sofa. He picked up the remote and muted the volume of the TV as he sat down again. When the pins and needles started, Chamberlain moved from the edge of the bath to the toilet seat. She turned her head so that she couldn't see herself in the mirror. It was half an hour since she'd come upstairs, and she wondered how much longer she was going to have to sit there before she stopped feeling like a silly old woman. She'd spent the weekend going over the cold case she was supposed to be working on for AMRU: a bookmaker, stabbed to death in a pub car park in 1993. A dead man and a family who deserved justice as much as anybody else, but Chamberlain was in no fit state to help them get it. She was finding it hard to care about anything about anything else.
The Jessica Clarke case had been one she'd been close to. As close as she had ever been to any case.
And she'd got it wrong.
Three nights earlier, on the last train home after the evening round at Tom Thorne's, she'd almost convinced herself that she was being stupid. What could she have done differently? Rooker had confessed, for heaven's sake. There was no earthly reason why they should ever have looked for anyone else.
Sitting on that all-but-deserted train, she'd almost convinced herself, but wrong was wrong, and it still hurt. She felt the pain of professional failure, and another, much worse pain, that comes from knowing you've let down someone very important.
Another train had begun rushing past, and she'd turned to watch. Her reflection had danced across the windows of the train as it flashed by. After it had gone, she'd stared at her face, floating in the darkness on the other side of the glass, and noticed that she was crying. The most painful thing, of course, was feeling useless. Being surplus to requirements. It was knowing that she'd got it wrong, and that she would play no part in putting it right again.
She'd heard the swish of the carriage door as it slid back, and watched the man moving towards her, reflected in the window. Watched as he'd weaved slowly back towards his seat with a bag from the buffet. Watched as he'd stopped at her table.
"Are you all right, love?"
In the bathroom, Chamberlain raised her head as she heard footsteps on the stairs. They stopped, and she heard Jack call out her name. There'd been a few days, a couple of weeks earlier, when she'd begun to feel like a copper again; when she went in with Thorne to see Gordon Rooker; when the two of them had confronted Billy Ryan outside his arcade. Then, once they'd begun to deal with Rooker, she'd been eased gently aside, and it had felt as bad as when she'd handed in her warrant card seven years before. It was only to be expected, of course. Friday night round at the flat in Kentish Town Thorne showing her the CCTV footage had been a favour and nothing else. She knew that there weren't likely to be any more.
She dropped slowly to her knees and reached into the cupboard under the sink for the cleanser and a cloth.
If anybody else was going to sort things out for Jessica Clarke, she'd be happy for it to be Tom Thorne. But she didn't want anybody else to do it… The footsteps on the stairs started again, and grew closer. She held the dry cloth under the tap for a few seconds, told herself to start worrying about dead bookies and stop being so bloody ridiculous.
The knock came, softly, as she squeezed a thick line of pale yellow cleanser around the rim of the bath.
"Are you all right, love?"
14 March 1986
Taking over a year out of school is really starting to cause a few problems. Now that Ali and Manda and the rest have moved up, I'm stuck with people who are younger than me that I didn't really know before. I can talk to most of the girls in my own year about everything. About the ops and the grafts and all the rest of it. But I only see them in the playground at lunchtime, and some of them are already a bit distant because they're one year higher up the school and are acting like they're one year older or something.
The girls in my class are trying too hard. I think that's basically the problem. I know bloody well they've been spoken to about what to say and what not to say. I also happen to know that someone from the hospital came to the school to see the teachers the week before I came back, and some of them are better at appearing natural about it than others.
My new class teacher is pretty cool, though.
There are a couple of girls I think are OK in the new class, but a lot of the time I can't stand most of them. Maybe I'm being unfair because I know it's a bit awkward. I remember feeling a bit strange around a girl in junior school who had a harelip. I can remember trying not to ignore her, then gabbling when I spoke to her and going red. Actually, with some of the girls it's really hard to tell the difference between fear and shyness. There's a few, though, who are just going way over the top in trying to be my new best friend and a couple are just ignorant bitches.