"That mask I was talking about, the pressure mask, they do it all with lasers now, you know. They scan the face with these lasers and it's always a perfect fit. No doctors or parents to mess it up. The treatment of burns is so much better now than it was then. Everything's moved on. Now they use hyperbaric oxygen therapy to reduce the scarring in the early days. Amazing things, new techniques, new discoveries all the time: micro dermabrasion laser skin resurfacing, chemical peeling, you name it. There are sites I've got book marked on the computer at home, you know? Medical news groups chat rooms you can join. You can find just about anything on the Internet if you're interested enough, or nerdy enough, depending on how you want to look at it, and you've got the time. I'm quite the expert on all the new developments.
"These are good days to get burned."
"The grafts are amazing now, really amazing. Single-sheet grafts, that's what's really made the difference. Back in our day, they only did split-skin grafts. You understand what I'm saying? They took shavings from different areas and it was virtually impossible to stop it contracting. To stop the scar tissue tightening. Now, they've got artificial skin which they can use for temporary grafting. It's amazing stuff, you know? Made from shark skin and silicon. Back then…God, listen to me, talking as if it was a hundred bloody years ago…Back then, they used cadaver grafts. Just the name makes you go a bit funny, doesn't it? Skin harvested from the dead.
"Skin from corpses. On my girl's neck. Lying across her face."
"They can even grow skin in labs now. They can grow it. Skin that's as near as damn it the same as the stuff we were born with. It's as thick as human skin, that's the real step forward. They call it "immortal skin". "Immortal" because the cells never stop growing. Ever. Did you know that there's only one naturally occurring human cell in which immortality is considered normal? Do you want to guess?
It's the cancer cell..
"Now, they've got immortal skin."
Finally, he paused.
Thorne took half a step towards him. "Ian.."
"Bad guys have scars. Monsters and murderers in films and on TV. The Phantom of the fucking Opera and the Joker and Freddie Krueger."
"Maybe we've moved on from that kind of rubbish, too," Thorne said. If Clarke heard what Thorne had said, he chose to ignore it. "It's like wearing a mask you can never take off," he said. "Jess wrote that in her diary."
"I read it."
Clarke looked up, his eyes bright, his voice suddenly cracked and raw.
"What she said about the party? You remember what she wrote that last day, about the speech someone was going to make on her birthday? It was exactly what I was planning to do. Exactly. Even down to the crap jokes."
Thorne found it hard to meet the man's gaze, as he had that day in the house off Wandsworth Common. He dropped his eyes slowly to the ground. Down past the fists that had tightened around the edge of the wreath, the knuckles white as the petals that had fallen at Ian Clarke's feet.
TWENTY-THREE
"I think you're an idiot, Tom."
"Cheers. Thanks for that."
"I think you're a fucking idiot."
"Jesus, Carol."
The shock of hearing Chamberlain swear not an everyday occurrence somehow softened the blow of the comment itself. Chamberlain's pithy character assassination simultaneously managed to kill the conversation stone dead; to thicken the space between them. After half a minute spent tearing up beer mats and avoiding eye contact, Thorne held up his empty glass. Without fully shifting her gaze from the back of a stranger's head, Chamberlain nodded. She slid her empty wineglass across the table.
Thorne walked across to the bar, ordered a pint of Guinness and a glass of red.
They were in the Angel on St. Giles High Street. The pub, pleasantly tatty and old fashioned, stood on or around the site of a tavern which, several hundred years before, had been on the route from Newgate Prison to the gallows at Tyburn. The condemned man's final journey, which took him along what was now Oxford Street, involved stopping at the tavern for a last drink. The drink was given free, the joke being that the customer would pay for it 'on his way back'. Thorne handed over his ten-pound note, knowing that he wouldn't receive a great deal of change. The concept of free drinks certainly belonged in a bygone age, like smallpox or press-gangs. These days, you could crawl into a pub on your hands and knees with two minutes to live and you'd be lucky to find so much as a complimentary bowl of peanuts on the bar.
Those who knew the history of the pub also knew that the custom for which it had once been famous had spawned the phrase so beloved of publicans and piss heads alike. Thorne walked back to the table, put down the drinks. "One for the road," he said. Chamberlain understood the reference. Her smile managed indulgence and disapproval at the same time. "Right, and we all know who's likely to be the one swinging, don't we?"
Thorne's face, save for the moustache of froth, was a picture of innocence. "Do we? I can't see why." He could see perfectly well why, but felt like arguing about it. He was less certain about why he'd told Carol Chamberlain what he'd said to Alison Kelly in the first place. He'd actually decided to tell Chamberlain, to confide in her, well before this evening. Well before Alison had killed Billy Ryan even. So he could hardly blame the beer.. "The sex part I understand," she said.
"Oh, good."
"After all, you are a bloke."
"Right. I'm a mindless brute in helpless thrall to my knob." Chamberlain reddened slightly. "You said it." The blush made Thorne smile. "I didn't tell her because I slept with her," he said.
"So why, then?" She answered the question herself. "Because you're an idiot."
"Let's not start that again."
She shook her head, exasperated, and took a slug of red wine. Thorne wondered if the things she'd seen, that she surely must have heard, had made Chamberlain blush back when she was on the force. Perhaps it was simply a reaction that suppressed itself in certain situations, like a bookmaker's pity or a whore's gag reflex. She was certainly a damn sight less worldly than she often pretended.
"You're pissed off because it wasn't you," Thorne said. "Because you had nothing to do with it."
"I'm pissed off because of a lot of things." It didn't sound like an invitation to pry, or a willingness to share. Thorne held his tongue and waited to see where she wanted to go.
"You're right, though," she said. "I knew I could never play a part in bringing Ryan down. However much you indulged me."
"Carol, I never."
She silenced the protestation with the smallest movement of her hand.
"Still, knowing I wasn't going to be involved didn't stop me imagining certain. scenarios."
"Ryan dead, you mean?"
"Not just dead. I thought about killing him myself. I thought about it a lot."
Thorne raised an eyebrow. "How was it?"
"It was great."
"The way you killed him or the way it made you feel?"
"Both."
"And the reality isn't quite as good as you'd imagined it.." She pulled a tissue from her sleeve, dabbed at a ring of wine left on the table. "It's not the right result, Ryan being dead." Thorne had turned the same thing over and over in his head, looked at it from every angle, examined it in every conceivable light. "Do you not think he's paid for what he did?"
Page 165 billingham, mark – the burning girl
Chamberlain said nothing.
"Look, the law could have taken its course, and Tughan, or somebody like him, might have got lucky and maybe, five years from now, Billy Ryan would have been cock of the walk in Belmarsh or Parkhurst. I'm not necessarily saying that what happened was right or that he got what was coming to him. How the hell could I, knowing. what I had to do with it? I just can't find it in myself to feel the slightest bit gutted that he's dead."