The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

by Harry Bingham

  ‘But there were some Indian faces there, as I remember?’ Amina doesn’t have an internet connection and my iPad is still in Cardiff. But I’m pretty sure there were.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘We know when Henderson and Quintrell arrived and left the hotel that day. Can you check those times against flights to and from Bangalore?’

  ‘Bangalore? Why Bangalore?’

  I tell him.

  He checks on his computer as I hold the line. ‘Well, bloody hell.’

  He tells me that a flight came in from Bangalore that morning. The time would have been enough for someone to have come through immigration, showered in the business lounge, and come on to the hotel. The flight time back tallied reasonably well with Quintrell and Henderson’s departure too.

  I say, ‘I think we need to check the passenger manifest. Also, can we get number plates for every car in the hotel car park that day?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll get onto that immediately.’

  On the seventh day, I speak to Brattenbury again. He says, ‘That Heathrow hotel.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘OK, whoever books a conference room has to sign for a key. We got a handwriting specialist to check those signatures. No “Vic Henderson” on the list of course, but we’ve got one signature that tallies pretty well with samples of his handwriting we’ve taken from his house.’

  ‘OK, good.’

  ‘That particular conference room was originally booked for an hour after the Bangalore flight was due to land. As you say, Bangalore is basically India’s answer to Silicon Valley. It’s heaving with IT types. So your guess looked spot on.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Wait, it gets better. Quintrell and Henderson didn’t arrive then, though. Hotel CCTV pictures has them arriving at the hotel three hours after the flight was due to come in. So your guess looked bad, except that …’

  ‘Don’t tell me—’

  ‘Yep. The flight was delayed. Some refueling problem in Bangalore. Two hours late arriving. Henderson and Quintrell just shifted their arrival time accordingly. Oh, and the meeting broke up just in time for the flight back home.’

  ‘Bingo!’

  ‘Yes, quite. And we can compare passenger manifests for the journey there and back. Both flights were fully booked but only sixteen passengers came for the day only. So our guy is one of those.’

  ‘Guy or guys. These boys don’t do things by halves.’

  ‘No. Look, I think we need to bring you in for a day. You should meet Susan Knowles, who’s leading the IT part of all this. You’ll like her.’

  I say yes, that’s a good idea.

  Later that day, I give Amina another fifty pounds of rent money. Forty pounds for food. She takes the cash and doesn’t tell me I don’t need to give it.

  On the tenth day, I take a train into central London. Follow a route prescribed for me by Brattenbury. I’m walking up the Earl’s Court Road when a grey Mondeo draws up alongside me. Two men inside, windows wound down.

  ‘All right, love, we’re on your team,’ says one. ‘No one on you.’

  The other says, ‘Adrian’s got a hotel room round the corner. Nice place too.’

  He’s right. It’s one of those boutiquey hotels you see in the magazines. Designery and secluded. Ornate Victorian brickwork crowded with window-boxes, each one a fury of nasturtiums and scarlet marigolds.

  Inside, Brattenbury takes me up to a suite. A small but lovely sitting room and, behind, an invisible bedroom. There’s a woman there: sleek, late thirties, red-headed, intelligent. She introduces herself as Susan Knowles. She’s from the part of SOCA that used to be the Hi-Tech Crime Unit, though she’s nobody’s idea of a geek.

  She shakes my hand and says, ‘Adrian’s wondergirl. Nice to meet you at last.’

  Adrian’s wondergirl doesn’t quite know how to answer that so, as he fusses with glasses and bottled water in the corner, I make meaningless small talk instead. She studies me carefully, as though I’m an unusual specimen, an object of gossip.

  I let her scrutinize away. A butterfly preening under the lepidopterist’s lens.

  As Brattenbury rejoins us, we turn straight to business. The first item for discussion is my portfolio of names. The twenty-nine where we know a fraud is currently active. The nineteen further names, where the individuals concerned are, in fact, regular employees of Western Vale, doing their regular work at a regular salary.

  Brattenbury says, ‘Do you have any ideas about what those nineteen names might be all about?’

  I tell them what I think’s going on.

  Knowles says, ‘Yes, we think the same.’ She trails off and in the silence we feel the shadow of a larger crime, concealed within one that is already large enough, one that has already taken two lives.

  ‘It’s no wonder they killed Kureishi,’ I said. ‘When you think what they’re playing for.’

  ‘And it would explain why they’re quite so security-conscious,’ says Brattenbury.

  ‘Flying in IT consultants from Bangalore. That’s a completely new one in my experience,’ adds Knowles.

  There’s a tiny silence in which we all try to ignore the fact that, if the stakes are as high as we think they are, the life of one little payroll clerk won’t figure much.

  Instead, we do what all coppers do in a case that’s not making sufficient progress. We turn to detail. Knowles wants to know exactly what’s happening, payroll-wise, with those nineteen names. Anything odd as regards tax, or overtime, or any of the other matters that cross my desk.

  I give, from memory, a very full description of what I’ve been doing.

  At one point Knowles is worried that I’m inventing stuff to please her, and she says, ‘This is a lot of detail, Fiona. Are you sure you remember all this correctly?’

  I say, ‘I can’t be certain, no, but I knew this would be important so I invented mnemonics to help me remember. Plus I used a spreadsheet to keep notes of what was happening as I went along, then closed the spreadsheet without saving it.’ I look at Brattenbury and say, ‘I assume …?’

  He nods. He’s got a pad in front of him which, I now realize, he’s been consulting while I was speaking with Susan. ‘We reconstructed the spreadsheet from the log of your key strokes. Your spreadsheet didn’t cover everything you’ve just been discussing, but where I can check your memory against what you wrote in the spreadsheet …’ His gaze turns to Susan. ‘She’s better than ninety per cent accurate. Maybe even ninety-five.’

  Susan gives me a smile, big, warm and genuine. One that starts in the eyes and stays there after the lips have finished their thing. There’s also, I note, a darted look between her and Brattenbury. His look, I think, says, See what I mean?

  And from that point on – I don’t know. I’ve never encountered anything like it. The pair of them start treating me like an adult. The way, I imagine, senior officers routinely deal with one another. Brattenbury and Knowles share information, suggest possible lines of inquiry, ask for my opinion. At one point, I complain that my police-coding restricts my ability to see some of SOCA’s Tinker files. Knowles just nods and, off a look from Brattenbury, says, ‘I’ll get that fixed.’

  And, I think, I become a better officer. Less obstreperous. Easier to work with. I even – is this possible? – become almost tentative in my opinions and suggestions. Collegiate.

  I feel both junior and special. Junior, because I am. By rank, age and experience. But also those intangibles. They’re both Londoners. Cardiff is, to them, not a capital city, but a provincial one, Western Vale, not a huge company. This fraud, just another case.

  That, plus all those other little things. Those indicators of sophistication that people like these let fall like beads. Knowles wears ankle-skimming jeans in a sort of greeny yellow. Lavender cardigan worn over a pale grey T-shirt. The outfit is impeccably casual. Weekend wear. Not-trying-too-hard wear. And yet. The jeans are flatteringly skinny without being remotely tarty. The outfit is casual, but accessorized with a w
atch and bracelet, both of which look glossily expensive. The jeans themselves – what color are they even? I call them greeny yellow because I don’t have the vocabulary to be more precise. I guess Knowles herself would call them lime yellow, or greengage, or dusky citrus, or some other term which she’d produce without self-consciousness. When Brattenbury asks us if we want tea or coffee, she says, ‘Oh, I’d love an Americano. No, actually, you know what, I’ll have a caffè mocha, semi-skimmed, no cream,’ and all that – the initial order, the reversal, the precision of the final request – comes without that flicker of ooh, look at me which almost any Welsh woman would feel the need to insert. Any Welsh woman, including me, and when Knowles says ‘caffè mocha’, she says it in a way which indicates both that she is reasonably comfortable in Italian and that she doesn’t need to show off about it.

  I say, ‘Can I just have a peppermint tea, please?’ and Knowles smiles at me, nicely, as if I’ve done something charming.

  At the same time, I have something that they don’t. I’m still the tip on the end of their javelin. Still their only lead of consequence.

  And, too, I’m aware of their respect. Has Knowles ever done anything like this? Has Brattenbury? I don’t know, but I doubt it. This hotel, the designery suite and the riot of windowboxes, is their way of saying, We know this is hard. You’re doing well. Hang in there.

  At one point, I say, ‘Are we sure they’ll come and get me? It’s been eleven days.’

  Brattenbury says, ‘They have to come and get you. You’re the only payroll clerk they’ve got. We keep dangling Roy Williams in front of their noses and they’re not interested. And as for earning their trust, you’ve done everything a police spy wouldn’t have done. Operationally speaking, I think things have gone pretty much perfectly.’

  I laugh: I think Brattenbury has just forgiven my catfight with Quintrell.

  Susan says, ‘I saw pictures of what you did to her Audi. They’ve gone viral in the office.’

  We talk about the Tinker team. When we started the project we assumed a shortish list of personnel. Our first hypothesized team composition ran as follows:

  ??? – Boss

  Vic Henderson – Security & operations

  Saj Kureishi – IT guy

  ??? – possible additional gang members

  Already, that list has been expanded. Our list now looks like this:

  ??? – Boss

  Vic Henderson, Allan Wiley [plus others???] – Security & operations

  Anna Quintrell – accounting

  Bangalore consultant[s] – IT

  ??? – possible additional gang members

  I say, ‘All that funny money in the Caribbean. Those Panamanian foundations and all the rest of it. You need to know what you’re doing to set that stuff up. I can’t see Quintrell knowing enough to do that. Or Henderson.’

  ‘True,’ says Brattenbury. ‘But you can just buy that kind of expertise in. London’s a world center for that kind of knowhow.’

  ‘Right. But if you’re holding a big get-to-know-you meeting with your new IT guys, wouldn’t you want everyone there? I mean, all the systems will have to coordinate. Getting the money offshore. Hiding it when it’s there.’

  Brattenbury and Susan share a look. He says, ‘Yes, worth a look.’

  She flips open a laptop, calling up a SOCA screen with a list of all the vehicles parked in the hotel car park on the relevant day. The vehicles and their owners. Brattenbury, meanwhile, is dragging a bunch of files from a black document case.

  SOCA’s data systems look a little different from ours, but the principle is the same. The hotel car park saw a total of 127 cars present for all or part of the meeting time. SOCA’s analysts have already pulled together names, addresses, vehicle types, entry and exit times, home phone data, usually mobile data too. Often job descriptions. Links to Facebook and other online pages. They’ve even used Google Street View to collect photos of the car owners’ homes and another website to collect guesstimated market prices.

  I say, ‘The guy we’re looking for has got a nice car and an expensive house.’

  Susan filters the data to include only properties worth £750,000 or more.

  ‘That’s not a lot for London,’ she cautions.

  Thirty-two names are left.

  ‘Let’s try a million.’

  Twenty-four names.

  Susan tries a few other filters – car values, length of stay, any phone use to or from the South Wales area – but they don’t seem to shed much light. We go back to the twenty-four.

  ‘We don’t have to do this now,’ Brattenbury says.

  I stare at him. Like I have something better to do.

  He shrugs. From one of his folders, he pulls out a bunch of stapled sheets, one bunch for each of the 127 cars parked. He starts picking out the twenty-four individuals we’re now concerned with. As he’s doing that, Susan kicks off her shoes and does a series of stretches. Yoga probably.

  Someone’s ordered sandwiches from room service, and a big tray of them arrive.

  We eat sandwiches and play hunt-the-villain.

  We’ve got lots of accountants, bankers, lawyers, management consultants, that sort of thing. But given that this is a business hotel outside Heathrow, we’d have expected nothing less. Brattenbury finds a lawyer, cautioned for cocaine use while at university, specialty in European tax law, big house in Chelsea, recent phone use to and from South Wales.

  ‘Sounds good,’ says Susan.

  ‘Mmm,’ I say, and reach for more food.

  ‘Try these. They’re goat’s cheese and roasted pepper.’

  ‘Thing is,’ I say, ‘phone use to South Wales looks too blatant, doesn’t it? If we know anything about these boys, it’s that they’re a hundred per cent on anything to do with security. Outside an emergency, it would be all disposable phones, bought for cash.’

  ‘It’s his sister,’ says Susan, looking at her laptop. ‘I’ve got her Facebook page up. She runs a small stud farm outside … wherever that is.’

  ‘Mynyddislwyn,’ I say, helping her with the place name. ‘Outside Pontllanfraith.’

  There’s nothing in my pile of stuff which interests me. I reach for Susan’s discards. Start to work through them. Reach the sixth name down.

  James Wyatt. A London accountant. Working for a firm just outside the big four. Background in audit, but now a ‘consultant’, whatever that means. Nothing particularly interesting in that, except that an article in Accountancy World magazine, dating four years back, happens to link him to a company called Bay Properties. Which is majority owned by a man named David Marr-Phillips. A man who lives in Cardiff and whose integrity and lawful conduct I do not completely trust.

  Is this the slimmest of all slim leads? Or nothing at all?

  Mr. Wyatt drives a Porsche Boxter. Value: about forty-five thousand pounds. Lives off the Old Brompton Road in London. Two-bedroom flats in the road go for more than one point five million, and it’s not quite clear from the data we have whether Wyatt has a flat or a house.

  ‘What do accountants earn?’ I ask. ‘Used to be, um, a senior audit manager,’ and I name the firm.

  ‘We can check,’ says Brattenbury. He calls his office. Gives instructions to a colleague.

  Susan is online, checking a salary guide published by a London recruitment consultancy. ‘A hundred K,’ she says. ‘That’s an upper limit, unless the guy is very experienced.’

  ‘He’s thirty-four,’ I say, checking. ‘Lives near here. Is that a flat or a house?’

  Brattenbury makes another call. To the grey-Mondeo men from earlier, I’m guessing. He tells them to attempt a ‘delivery’ to the address, scope out whether Wyatt has the whole property or just one floor.

  I study Wyatt’s call log. Plenty of international calls there – not too surprising, given the kind of names we’re looking at – including a good few to the United States. Only, I think I’m right in saying that the US shares its ‘1’ country code prefix not just with Canad
a, but the Caribbean too.

  ‘Susan,’ I say, ‘can you check area code 345 for me?’

  She does.

  The Cayman Islands.

  ‘Area code 284?’

  ‘British Virgin Islands.’

  About the same time, Brattenbury gets a couple of texts in.

  Looking over my shoulder at the call logs, he says, ‘At his last place of work, the guy earned about £125,000, including bonuses. That house he’s living in, he’s got all of it. Value about two and a half, three million.’

  There’s a pause, then someone says, ‘Gotcha.’

  I think the someone was me.

  ‘Yes, gotcha,’ murmurs Brattenbury. He calls the office. He wants surveillance on Wyatt’s house, but will need an interception warrant. We don’t actually have any evidence of Wyatt’s involvement in crime, but the circumstantial evidence we have is powerfully suggestive and the crimes here are big ones. I don’t think Brattenbury will have much difficulty in obtaining what he needs.

  Our putative list of gang members grows another name:

  James Wyatt (?) – offshore finance specialist

  If I could, I’d work all night on this. I’d turn the lights down, eat at strange hours, make a nest of pillows and cushions on the floor, access every database I could think of, trace every lead no matter how minor. Once, on a different case, we made a breakthrough because I found, on the suspect’s partner’s niece’s Facebook page, a photo of a school concert with one face partially out of frame. I used a combination of Photoshop and online facial analysis software to determine that the out-of-frame face was highly consistent with that of our suspect. I then visited the Facebook page of every other parent and schoolchild present that night until I found a photo that was unmistakably of our guy, placing him in Cardiff when he’d claimed to be in Porthcawl. The case wasn’t even a big deal. A handling stolen goods charge with a probable six-month sentence. I didn’t even tell the DI leading the investigation how I’d found the photo, because I wasn’t really assigned to the inquiry and I prefer to hide how obsessive I actually am.

  But, much as I’d love to stay and work through the night, my cover demands that I go back to Amina’s.