For half a minute, Thorne watched Rooker stare down at the table-top. His scalp was visible, pink and flaking beneath the white hair. "Like you said, though. He's waited a long time, this nutter. Why have you been here so long, Gordon?"
The animation returned. "Ask the fucking judge. Miserable arse-hole's dead by now, if there's any justice." He laughed, humourlessly, at his own joke. "Like he'd know justice if it bit him in the bollocks."
"It was a high-profile case," Thorne said. "You were always going to get sent down for a long one."
"Listen, I wasn't expecting a slap on the wrists, all right? Look at what some of these bastards get away with now, though. Blokes who've carved up their wives are getting out after ten years. Less sometimes."
Without an ounce of sympathy, knowing that he deserved every second he spent banged up, Thorne could nevertheless understand the point that Rooker was making. The twenty-year tariff or 'relevant part of the sentence' he'd been handed was more than twice many so-called 'life sentences' Thorne had seen doled out.
"There's no fairness to it," Rooker said. "Twenty years. Twenty years on fucking VP wings."
Thorne tried not to smirk: Vulnerable Prisoners. "Are you still vulnerable then, Gordon?"
Rooker blinked, said nothing.
"Still dangerous, though, apparently. Twenty years and still a Cat. B?
You can't have been a very good boy."
"There have been a few incidents."
"Never mind, eh? Almost done, aren't you?"
"Three months left until the twenty's up."
Thorne leaned back, glanced to his right. The black woman caught his eye as she fished a crumpled tissue out of her handbag. He turned back to Rooker. "It's a coincidence, don't you reckon? This bloke turning up now, claiming responsibility."
Rooker shook his head. "I doubt it. This is the best possible time to get the attention, isn't it? When I'm coming up for release. For possible release. Mind you, if he thinks they're going to let me out, he's dafter than I thought."
"What is it, a DLP?"
Rooker nodded. Once the tariff was completed, the Discretionary Lifer Panel of the Parole Board could recommend release to the Home Secretary. The panel comprised a judge, a psychiatrist and one other professional connected to the case, a criminologist or a probation officer. The review, unlike normal parole procedure, involved an oral hearing, and the prisoner could bring along a lawyer, or a friend, to represent him.
"I've got no sodding chance," Rooker said. "I've already had a couple of knock backs in as many years." He looked at Thorne, as if expecting some sort of explanation or reassurance. He received neither. "What have I got to do? I've been to counseling, I've gone on Christ knows how many courses."
"Remorse is important, Gordon." The word seemed almost to knock Rooker back in his seat. Thorne leaned forward. "These people are big on that, for some mysterious reason. They like to see some victim empathy, you know? Some shred of understanding about what it is that you actually did to your victim, to her family. Maybe they don't think you're sorry enough, Gordon. What do you reckon? Maybe that's the question they want answering. Where's the remorse?"
"I held up my hand to it, didn't I? I confessed."
"It's not the same thing."
The scrape of Rooker's chair as he pushed himself back from the table was enough to make Thorne wince. "Are we done?" Rooker asked. Thorne eased his own chair back and looked again to his right, where the black woman was now sobbing, the tissue pressed against her mouth. He caught the eye of the man sitting opposite her. The man looked back at Thorne like he wanted to rip his head off. As promised, Tom Thorne had rung as soon as he'd left the prison. He'd told her briefly about his meeting with Rooker. She'd heard everything she'd hoped to hear, and yet the relief which Carol Chamberlain had expected was slow in coming.
She sat at her desk, in the makeshift office she and Jack had rigged up in the spare room the year before. It was less cluttered than it had been then, a lot of junk transferred to the top of the wardrobe and stuffed beneath the spare bed, box-files piled on top of what used to be a dressing-table. It was now used as a bedroom only once or twice a year when Jack's daughter from his first marriage made the effort to visit.
Jack shouted up to her from downstairs. "I'm making some tea, love. D'you want some?"
"Please."
Chamberlain could never understand those colleagues' ex-colleagues who insisted that they couldn't remember certain cases. She was bemused by those who struggled to recall the names and faces of certain rapists and murderers; or their victims. Yes, you forgot a file number, or the colour of a particular vehicle, of course you did, but the people stayed with you. They stayed with her at any rate. And she knew that they stayed with Tom Thorne, too. She recalled him telling her once that the faces he could never forget were those he'd never seen. The ones belonging to the killers he had never caught. The smug faces he imagined on those that had got away with it. Perhaps those who claimed not to remember had developed some technique for forgetting; some trick of the trade. If so, she wished that she'd been a bit closer to some of them, spent a few more nights in curry houses or out on the piss. If she had, they might have passed the secret on to her.
For reasons she wasn't ready to admit to herself, she hadn't wanted to pull the Jessica Clarke files officially, to draw any attention to herself or to the case. Instead, she'd called in a favour, gone down to the General Registry in Victoria, and taken a quick look while an old friend's back was turned. Within a few seconds of opening the first battered brown folder, she could see that she'd remembered Gordon Rooker perfectly. The face in the faded black-and-white ID photo was exactly as she'd been picturing it since the night when she'd received that first phone call.
"I burned her."
It was still the face she pictured now, despite the two decades that had passed. She'd tried, since speaking to Thorne, to age the image mentally, to give it the white hair and lines that Thorne had described, but without any success.
She guessed this was the way memory worked.
A colleague on the Cold Case Unit, now a man in his early sixties, had worked on the Moors Murders case. He told her that when he thought about Hindley and Brady, he still saw those infamous pictures of them, smug and sunken-eyed. He could never imagine the raddled old man and the smiling, mumsy brunette.
Bizarrely, Carol Chamberlain needed to remember Rooker's face. She equated this total recall of him with the confidence she had in his guilt. It was an illogical, ridiculous collision of ideas, and yet, to her, it made perfect sense. His face, the one she knew every inch of, was the face of the man she saw kneeling by the fence. His face, the one she remembered smiling across an interview room, was the face of the man she saw running away, exhilarated, down the hill, away from the school.
She clung to that memory now, her grip stronger since the call from Thorne. Of course, there had been doubt, and she knew, from his question about Rooker at the station, that Thorne had sensed it. It had sprouted in the dark and pushed as she'd sat shivering. It had grown like a weed, forcing its way up through the cracks in a slab as she'd lain awake.
"I burned her."
Now, thankfully, that doubt was dying. It had begun to shrivel from the moment she'd picked up the phone and made that call to Thorne. Now Thorne had been to see Rooker and heard him confirm it. Heard him confess it, again.
There was relief, but it could never be complete, for while the remembrance of Rooker's face was oddly comforting, there was also the face of Jessica Clarke to consider.
Chamberlain had seen photos; snaps of a smiling teenager, pale skin and dark hair down past her shoulders. She could still see the hands of the parents trembling as they lifted wooden picture frames from a sideboard, but the girl's face the smooth, perfect face she'd had before had been all too easy to forget.