Thorne had watched from inside the dark, unmarked Rover at the back of the line. He'd stared as pedestrians had bowed their heads or tipped their hats, unaware to whom they were showing respect. Thorne had found it funny. Respect was, after all, very important to a certain type of businessman.
Those carrying Billy Ryan's body moved awkwardly along the narrow grove, struggling to retain the necessary degrees of dignity and balance as they stepped across gnarled roots and around leaning headstones. One of their number walked two steps ahead of the coffin to push aside overhanging branches. The mourners followed gingerly, in single file.
Thorne was not the only police officer present. Tughan was a little way ahead of him, and a fair number of SO7 boys were knocking around somewhere. Thorne recognised plenty of other faces, too. These were a little harder, the eyes that bit colder. He wondered how many mourners were carrying weapons; how many years the pallbearers had done between them. He wondered whether the killer of Muslum and Hanya Izzigil might be the man next to him.
It occurred to Thorne that, with the exception of the vicar and the blokes in the black hats, there were probably no men there without either a warrant card or a criminal record. Come to think of it, even the vicar looked dodgy.
They rounded a corner and the track widened out towards a freshly prepared grave. A green cloth lay all around the hole, garish against the clay. It was a decent-sized plot, expensive, with room for a fitting memorial. More flowers were already laid out, waiting. There were a few recently filled graves here, among many that were far older, the gleaming black headstones and brightly coloured marble chippings incongruous next to the weathered stones. The epitaphs were gold-edged and vulgar alongside the faded names that belonged to another age: Maud, Florence, Septimus.
The vicar spoke to begin the service:
"Oh God."
It pretty much summed up the way Thorne felt.
On the far side of the grave Stephen Ryan was clutching his mother's arm. His eyes were bloodshot; whether from cocaine or grief, it was hard for Thorne to tell. The eyes flashed Thorne a look, intense and loaded, but impossible to read.
Thank you for coming.
What am I supposed to do now.?
What the fuck do you think you're doing here.?
Get ready.. Thorne looked from the son to the mother. Ryan's wife stared, unblinking, at the coffin. Thorne had not had the pleasure. He remembered something Tughan had told him, and if the rumours were to be believed, any number of gardeners and personal trainers certainly had. The botox and plastic tits had clearly been doing the trick, and now she'd have much more money to spend on keeping herself desirable. When she raised her eyes towards him and then higher to the trees beyond, Thorne could see that they were dark and dry beneath the heavy make-up.
The vicar droned on, the occasional word lost to the caw of a crow or the rumble of a passing plane.
Thorne wondered if Billy Ryan had kept those old boxing skills sharp by practising them on the second wife as well as the first. It was, he decided, highly probable. Either way, the fucker had finally been made to pay for everything he'd done to Alison Kelly. But had he really paid for Jessica Clarke?
Thorne stared at the widow and the heir as the coffin was lowered into the grave. He couldn't be sure, but Ryan's wife looked like she just wanted to be certain he was never coming out. Stephen began to sob, and Thorne realised that he'd been holding on to his mother for support, not vice versa.
When various armed robbers began stepping forward to sprinkle dirt on to the coffin lid, Thorne decided it was about time to move in the opposite direction. He turned and walked slowly back along the rough, narrow track towards the main avenue. As he did, he read the headstones, in the same way that it was impossible not to look through a lighted window as you wandered along a street. Many of those resident beneath his feet seemed to have 'fallen asleep', which struck him now as always as childish and silly. But it was perhaps understandable that there were nearly as many euphemisms here as there were bodies. "Passed into rest' and 'gone to a better place' were, even Thorne had to admit, marginally more acceptable than 'hit by a truck' or 'fallen down a lift shaft'. Certainly better than 'knifed several times in his hallway, then again in his kitchen'. Thorne emerged on to the wide road that ran down to the cemetery gates.
He stopped by the hearse to rub the muzzle of one of the horses. A shiver ran down the animal's flank before it whinnied, and released a series of turds which splattered on to the tarmac. One bad memory well and truly exorcised.
Moving along the line of cars, Thorne walked past a number of serious-looking characters in long black coats, many of whom he knew to have written best-selling true-crime memoirs. They were doubtless greatly honoured to be policing Billy's service. Security, along with a healthy smattering of soap stars and minor sporting figures, was a prerequisite of the traditional gangland funeral. Thorne stopped next to a large, metal litter-bin. It was overflowing with plastic bags, plant pots and dead flowers. Leaning against it was someone he hadn't expected to see. "Is there really any point you being here?" Thorne asked.
Ian Clarke was clutching a large wreath of white lilies. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue jacket over a brown polo shirt. He clearly found Thorne's question highly amusing. "No point whatsoever," he said. "I went to Kevin Kelly's funeral, too. It was the least I could do."
Thorne found himself wondering if Clarke could possibly know about Ryan's part in what had happened to his daughter. He dismissed the thought, wondered instead if he should tell him. That idea was sent packing even quicker. If he hadn't opened his mouth once already, they wouldn't be standing in a cemetery at all.
He looked over towards the gatehouse. A gardener was moving slowly around the edge of a flower bed. One hand manoeuvred a strimmer, the other pressed a mobile phone to his ear.
When Ian Clarke began to speak, it was so quietly, and with such an absence of emotion, that it took Thorne a few seconds before he realised that he wasn't talking to himself. Once he'd begun to listen, Thorne could tell that he might just as well have been.
"It's the few days just after the burn that are the worst. Not just emotionally, but that's when all the real damage gets done, the peak damage. The progression of the injury can be ten times worse than the burn itself. Did you know that? That's what really causes the scarring.
"She couldn't open her eyes or her mouth after it happened. She couldn't bite. The screaming came out through her teeth, like a sound I'd never heard before. Like a noise that was bleeding out through what was left of her skin. There was a lot of screaming in those first few days."
"She had to wear a mask, a clear mask to keep a steady pressure on the damaged skin. It's basically to reduce the final height of the scars. To keep them supple. Over a year she wore that hideous bloody thing. Over a year, she wore it and hated it for twenty-three hours a day. Pointless in the end, though, because it hadn't been fitted properly and the damage had already been done. She had to keep still, you see, utterly still, absolutely fucking motionless while they put Vaseline across her face, and then this jelly stuff. She couldn't move a muscle while it set. "I could have let them anaesthetise her. Should have done. I didn't want her to have another operation, though. You understand? She'd already had six skin grafts and twenty-five blood transfusions by then. Some of the junior doctors used to joke, you know? They used to say she spent more time in the bloody hospital than they did.