The Burning Girl-4 by Mark Billingham

he'd cal ed Brigstocke the night before to tel him what was going on. They wouldn't be expecting him at the office.
    He reached down towards where the phone lay chirping on top of his clothes. His neck ached and his arms were freezing.
    It was Hol and. "I'm in a video shop in Wood Green," he said. "We've got two bodies, stil warm. And that's not the title of one of the videos .. ."
    FOUR
    The uniformed constable who'd been first on the scene was sitting at a smal table in a back room, next to a teenage boy whom Thorne guessed was Muslum Izzigil's son. Thorne stared across at them from the doorway. He couldn't decide which of the two looked the younger, or the most upset.
    Hol and stood at Thorne's shoulder. "The boy ran out into the street when he found them. Constable Terry was having breakfast in the cafe opposite. He heard the boy screaming."

    Thorne nodded and closed the door quietly. He turned and moved back into the shop, where screens had been hastily erected around the bodies. The scene of crime team moved with a practised efficiency, but it seemed to Thorne that the usual banter the dark humour, the craze -was a little muted. Thorne had hunted serial kil ers; he had known the atmosphere at crime scenes to be charged with respect, even fear, at the presentation, the offering up, of the latest victim. This was not what they were looking at now. This was almost certainly a contract kil ing. Stil , there was an odd feeling in the room. Perhaps it was the fact that there were two bodies. That they had been husband and wife.
    "Where was the boy when it happened?"
    "Upstairs," Hol and said. "Getting ready for school. He didn't hear anything."
    Thorne nodded. The kil er had used a silencer. "This one's a little less showy than the X-Man," he said.
    Muslum Izzigil was sitting against the wal between a display of children's videos and a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Lara Croft. His head was cocked to one side, his eyes half-open and popping. A thin line of blood ran from the back of his head, along freshly shaved jowls, soaking pink into the col ar of a white nylon shirt. The body of his wife lay, face downwards, across his legs. There was very little blood, and only the smal , blackened hole behind her ear told the story of what had happened. Or at least, some of it... Which one had he kil ed first?
    Did he make the husband watch while his wife was executed? Did the wife die only because she had tried to save her husband?
    Thorne looked up from the bodies. He noticed the smal camera in the corner of the shop. "Too much to hope for, I suppose?"
    "Far too much," Hol and said. "The recorder's not exactly hard to find. It's over there underneath the counter. The shooter took the tape with him."
    "One to show the grandchildren .. ."
    Hol and knelt and pointed with a biro to the back of the dead woman's neck. "Twenty-two, d'you reckon?"
    Thorne could see where the blood was gathering then. It encircled her neck like a delicate necklace, but it was pooling, sticky between her chin and the industrial grey carpet. "Looks like it," he said. He was already moving across the shop towards the back room. Towards what was going to be a difficult conversation .. .
    Constable Terry got to his feet when Thorne came through the door. Thorne waved him back on to his chair. "What's the boy's name?"
    The boy answered the question himself: "Yusuf Izzigil."
    AQ
    Thorne put him at about seventeen. Probably taking A levels. He'd gel ed his short, black hair into spikes and was making a decent enough job of growing a moustache. The hysteria which Hol and had mentioned, which had first alerted the police, had given way to a stil ness. He was quiet now, and seemingly composed, but the tears were stil coming just as quickly, each one pushed firmly away with the heel of a hand the instant it brimmed and began. to fal .
    He started to speak again, without being asked. "I was getting ready upstairs. My father always came down just after eight o'clock, to