Read Online The Burning Girl-4 by Mark Billingham - Free Book Online

three-quarters of the seventy tonnes of heroin that passed through London every year. They protected their investments fiercely.
    "Does Tughan think it's about smack?"
    Hol and wasn't listening. "Sorry .. .?"
    Thorne pointed back to the shop. "The Izzigils. Does our gangland expert in there think this is a turf war?"
    "Actual y, he thinks it's the Ryans."
    "Eh?"
    "He seems to think that this is a message from Bil y Ryan to who-ever's been knocking his boys off. A "declaration", he reckons."

    "That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?" Thorne said. "What's he base that on?"
    "No idea. He seems pretty convinced, though."
    Thorne closed his eyes as smoke from Hol and's cigarette drifted across his face. "It makes sense on one level, I suppose."
    "What?"
    "The Ryans were always going to work out who was after them long before we did."
    Thorne watched as two officers carrying body-bags moved towards the front door. Hendricks had obviously finished his preliminary examination. Thorne moved to fol ow the officers back inside, murmuring to Hol and as he passed: "Listen, the fact that Hendricks is staying at my place .. . Are people making cracks about it?"
    Hol and was enjoying a long drag. He laughed so much that he began to choke.
    Thorne had spent the last three years based at the Peel Centre in Hendon, and his familiarity with it, with Becke House in particular, had bred a good deal of contempt. The building a dun-coloured, three-storey blot on an already drab landscape had once housed dormitories for recruits. The beds had given way to open-plan incident rooms and suites of poky offices, but there were stil plenty of fresh faces to be spotted around the place, with the Metropolitan Police cadets now housed in another building within the same compound.
    It always struck Thorne as strange that the Serious Crime Group should be based where it was, hand in glove with a cadet-training centre. He remembered arriving back late one afternoon, a year or so earlier, and bumping into a uniformed cadet as he turned from locking his car. He'd spent the previous few hours trying to explain to an old woman why her son-in-law had taken an axe to her daughter and grandchildren. The look on Thorne's face that day had stopped the cadet dead in his tracks, hacking off his cheery greeting mid-sentence and sending the blood rushing from his smooth cheeks .. .
    The meeting was taking place in the office that Russel Brigstocke was reluctantly sharing with Nick Tughan. The SO7 Projects Team was based in a col ection of Portakabins at Barkingside, where Tughan and his team stil spent a fair amount of time, but since the joint operation had begun, there'd been something of a shake-up on the third floor of Becke House. Hol and and DC Andrew Stone now shared their office part time with two DCs from Serious and Organised Crime, leaving the third office to Thorne and DI Yvonne Kitson. The latter spent most of her time in the Incident Room, col ating information alongside office manager DS Samir Karim and their opposite numbers from SO7. So, more often than not, Thorne had his office, such as it was, to himself.
    "Right," said Tughan. "Game on. I think we've got ourselves a war .. ."
    Tughan's Irish accent could switch between syrupy and strident. Today, it went right through Thorne. He remembered the scrape of Gordon Rooker's chair across the floor of the visiting room at the Royal.
    Tughan leaned against the desk in a vain effort to make his superiority appear casual. He held up a piece of paper inside a transparent plastic jacket. "This was found among the dead man's paperwork. There are photocopies for each of you."
    Brigstocke and Kitson already had their copies. Hol and, Stone and Thorne moved forward and took theirs from the desk.
    "This letter isn't dated," continued Tughan, 'but, according to the son, it was delivered by hand five or six weeks ago."
    "Late Christmas present.. ." Stone said, looking for the laugh, a little too ful of himself, as usual.
    Tughan