The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

by Harry Bingham

‘You too, Fi.’ He uses the intimate version of my name instinctively. So naturally it takes me a moment to realize. ‘Maybe sometime before you head off to Kiwi-land, we could go away somewhere and forget about being sensible.’

  I nod. What I say is, ‘Maybe one day I’ll fall for a good guy. It would make life easier.’

  Henderson goes for the door, half opens it, says, ‘Nah. Good guys are boring.’ Leaves.

  I get dressed. Grey dress with black velvet at the neck and on the sleeves. Little brown belt. Dark tights and clicky heels. Attaché case.

  I do go next door to Quintrell’s room. She’s there, and lets me use her make-up without even being too grumpy about it. I’m not great with make-up, but there’s a cut over my lip which looks better for some concealer. Quintrell even helps me apply it.

  I say, ‘I don’t want to fight you, Anna.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Can we maybe start again? As if nothing had ever happened.’

  ‘OK. Yes. OK.’

  She’s not very communicative, but there’s a little rush of emotion in her face. I can’t read it. She probably finds all this difficult too. Henderson is core Tinker. Quintrell is no more than a hired hand. A temporary asset, like me.

  I think we ought to hug or something like that. Seal the deal. But Quintrell remains pulled back and withdrawn. So I just say, ‘Brilliant, thank you.’

  She smiles. It’s not a natural one, but effort counts for something too. She still doesn’t like me but at least we can be temporary allies.

  Back in my room, I take the flake of rock I took from the step yesterday and crumble it up. Little red particles of grit. Meaningless to me, but eloquent enough under a microscope. I scatter the grit through my clothes. A pinch goes into the crack between the wall of my shoe and the insole. A smear gets rubbed into the hem of a blue shirt, the seam of my dress. I distribute the stuff around till it’s all gone. Effectively invisible.

  Then I start to work on the towel that I used on Henderson’s blood marks. Some of the blood is his, but maybe not all of it. I take a bloodied thread from the towel and drop it into the inside seam of the pocket on my white shirt. A bit of lint, no more. Take the eyebrow hairs I plucked and put them into a jeans pocket. Although Henderson’s eye was bruised, the skin wasn’t broken, yet there was something – I think blood – matting the eyebrows.

  Then wash the towel. Hang it out. Tidy my tiny room.

  I like these small spaces. They swaddle me. I find them soothing.

  I don’t think about Quintrell much. She’s a fraudster and a fool, but she’s not a murderer and she’s not the progenitor of this scheme. We have enough evidence on her to convict her for all that she’s done.

  Henderson, though, he’s a different matter. I think about him and me, about the kiss we had and the dust devils we sought to ignore. Most of all, I think about what I said to him. Maybe one day I’ll fall for a good guy. That was a good Fiona Grey-ish thing to say. That poor lass has had few enough good men in her forlorn little life and the bad guys keep barging their way in.

  But me? I’m engaged to a handsome police sergeant, who loves me and is patient with me. Who has a perfect service record, in the police and in the army. Who is stable, calm and kind. Who is honorable by instinct and by belief. Who is tall and strong and (if you happen to like freckles) is sandily handsome. I have fallen for a good guy, haven’t I? Fallen hard and fallen well.

  But I don’t know if it was just Fiona Grey making that comment about good guys or if it was me too. And if it was me too, what sense can I make of it? I’ve always been attracted to Buzz. Always thought, God, I’m lucky that this man feels this way about me. Thought, The love of Buzz and my family are the best things in my life, bar nothing. They’re the reasons I make it through the day.

  I suspect I’m probably just experiencing what most undercover officers go through, sooner or later on assignment. The madness of isolation. A desire for intimate contact, because intimacy feels like an adequate substitute for truth. If I did have sex with Henderson, I wouldn’t even quite count it as infidelity. It would be just one of those things. An operational exigency.

  At five to twelve, there’s a tap at my door. Quintrell is there: smart green dress, black jacket, dark tights, heels. She says, ‘Ready?’ and we walk upstairs together.

  34.

  Those meetings! Like nothing else I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps it’s always like this in the private sector. The suits. The agendas. The two types of bottled water and the thermoses of hot drinks.

  There are eight of us in total. Ramesh has three colleagues with him, but he is clearly the most senior. All four speak good English. I know nothing about IT, but clearly these guys do. Clear too that they have further programmers back in Bangalore. We’re seeing the gleam of helmets, not the entire battle force.

  Then there are two British guys. One, a Londoner, who calls himself Terry. Late thirties, early forties. Short hair, black shirt, a suit which probably cost a lot of money, and a gold watch which is almost certainly some expensive branded thing. Then we are also, occasionally, graced with the presence of James Wyatt. He calls himself Phil but I recognize him from the surveillance photos on our system. He tells us that he is mostly on the finance side. That he’s just here to chip in, if he can help. That he doesn’t understand all the ‘techie stuff’.

  He pretends to be modest, but really his intention is to emphasize that he’s in finance, a holy land altogether higher and finer than the swamplands of IT. What he would think of Fiona Grey’s habitat of payroll clerking and homeless shelters, I can’t even imagine. He wears a striped blue shirt with an all-white collar. He has a handkerchief that matches his tie. I think, Fuck you too, Jimmy boy. Think how well that tie-and-hanky combo will go down in a Category A all-male clink. And fuck you too.

  Ramesh and gang are the programmers-in-chief. Terry is there to manage and direct. ‘Specify, program, beta-launch, full launch. And test, test, test, test.’ Terry’s phrase. As far as I can tell we’re mid beta-launch. Those nineteen payroll accounts which I’ve been monitoring are the dummy run. Something much bigger lies beyond them.

  Quintrell and I hear endless talk about field selection, dummy classes, remote users, filter value resets, UI objects, array correlations, and pagination widgets. People say things to each other like, ‘but if the MySQL data is firewalled, we might have to dehash the passwords.’ There’s are occasionally little linguistic misunderstandings between the Indian and British sides of the room, but Ramesh – or Ram, as everyone calls him – normally grasps these things first, then explains whatever it is rapidly to his colleagues in whatever language it is they speak. Not Hindi, I think. I don’t think Hindi goes that far south, so maybe Tamil or Kannada or some language I’ve never heard of.

  Quintrell doesn’t understand the IT talk any more than I do. We just let it wash by us, picnickers on the riverbank. But often enough, Terry or Ram will request clarification of something. How does HMRC handle maternity leave, if notification of that leave is delayed for some reason? If insufficient tax has been paid, is the amount owing recouped as a one-off thing or via the next year’s tax coding? And precisely when are PAYE coding notices sent out and who specifically receives them?

  Quintrell has her answer. I have mine. But we work together. She’ll say something like, ‘Well, the technically correct answer here would be …’ And I say things like, ‘Anna’s absolutely right of course, but I suppose that in practice …’

  We sit side by side, support each other’s answers, and pour water for each other. Although my first appearance arouses a prickle of remembered laughter, that soon dissipates under the pressure of work and, perhaps, my more businesslike appearance. Before long, Ram accepts me as part of the team, every bit as important as Quintrell herself. He calls us ‘our lady experts’ and, twice, ‘our beautiful lady experts’. That sounds creepy, but he means it courteously, and neither Quintrell nor I are in the mood to be all feminist about these things, so we jus
t do our best to be beautiful and expert all at once, and Quintrell at least does a good job on both fronts. She has lovely hair and good skin.

  From time to time, Henderson enters the room, and just lounges around on one of the chairs at the side. If it’s not him, it’s usually Geoff. And if it’s neither of those two, then it is indeed the man calling himself Allan Wiley. All three men are clearly part of the security group, but it seems to me that Henderson is the boss of this little unit.

  I wonder if there are more of them than just these three. I’m thinking yes.

  During our meetings, it’s rare that Henderson or either of the others interjects, but when they do, it’s always with a reminder about avoiding attention. At one point, a particular conversation led to one of the Indian guys saying, ‘Yes, but ninety-nine point something of data returns are going to look fine. We’ll get one or two weird results, that’s all.’ Henderson, who was in the room at the time, barked, ‘That’s exactly what we can’t have. No weird results ever. That’s the kind of thing that generates a call back to the software vendors, which we absolutely have to avoid.’

  That line – ‘no weird results ever’ – becomes our slogan. A good slogan too. An important one. Because our aim, which I now understand properly for the first time, is breathtakingly audacious.

  The family of software packages we’re working with – Total Payroll Solutions, or TPS – is the most widely used payroll system in the UK and, by far, the one most used by large corporations. Terry tells us that, in rough terms, the wages and salaries paid via TPS amount to about £170 billion. ‘At least that,’ he says. ‘At least.’

  That money has to be split up amongst millions of different employees, has to be apportioned out in tax and national insurance and everything else. Money that gets paid out, on time, in the correct amounts, all across the country. It’s money that families depend on. The lifeblood of the economy, no less.

  Henderson and his merry men aim to subvert that happy system. They aim to distribute a version of the software that almost exactly replicates the real thing, but which introduces what Terry and Ram are calling a ‘skim’. If a company uses the software Ram and his guys are producing, they will see a tax bill that is very slightly too high. HMRC will see one that is very slightly too low. The payment system built into the software will skim the difference. The amount of the skim hasn’t yet been finally settled, but it looks likely to be as little as one half of one tenth of one per cent of total payroll.

  A skim that tiny might sound too small to be worth bothering with, but apply that to nigh on two hundred billion and you’re talking almost a hundred million pounds. That’s a hundred million per annum, a cool two million a week.

  How long would it take a company to notice that it was being diddled? I’m not sure. I’m not an auditor and don’t have that kind of experience. But I do know that my team at Western Vale would never spot it. We look for obvious mistakes not tiny little rounding errors. My old superstore buddy, Sir Kevin the Bold of Swindon, said the same thing. It took his firm eighteen months to notice a major error and Kevin was neither idle nor incompetent.

  Nor do I think the taxman would notice the missing money. To a weirdly huge degree, the British system operates on trust. If a company’s numbers look like they’re in order, HMRC seldom carries out any major investigation. And if they do investigate, they’re looking for major fraud or gross incompetence. HMRC just doesn’t have the resources to tease out a half of a tenth of a one per cent error in the data. It doesn’t have the time, the staff or even the desire. Yet when you think about it, the crime being contemplated is breathtaking. So audacious, yet so simple in design and concept that you simply have to stand back and applaud its creators.

  Applaud, then arrest them.

  The system will also have what Terry calls a ‘Fuck It button’. Basically, if it looks like the scam is busted, there’ll be a feature which will allow a remote user to ramp the skim up to a full hundred per cent of all salary and taxes due. There’s no way that either HMRC or any company would fail to notice that kind of rip-off. Any half-alert corporate would just rip the plug out of their central server and suspend all payments until the problem was identified and solved. But even if you had just a day or two in between hitting the Fuck It button and getting closed down completely, the amount of money you could steal in that time could easily be in eight digits. Maybe nine.

  The hundred million pound heist.

  I’m looking at the Mona Lisa of theft. The Hamlet. The Beethoven’s Ninth.

  I remember our original planning meeting at Cathays. The one with Jackson, Brattenbury, the DCI from Devon and Cornwall, and the little twerp from the SFO. The SFO guy said, ‘We’re not really equipped to handle frauds of less than a million or so.’ He said, ‘We have to ask, is this case likely to be of widespread public concern?’

  Stupid fucker.

  Stupid arrogant SFO fucker.

  I think Kureishi was lucky to last as long as he did. I think I’ve been lucky, for that matter. With stakes like this, lives look cheap. This fraud, if it comes to fruition, will be by far the largest ever executed in Britain. Probably the world.

  Our beautiful lady experts.

  Please don’t be concerned.

  The little mystery of my portfolio of names – the twenty-nine fake names, the nineteen real ones – is also solved. The twenty-nine fake names were simply a way to generate enough money to cover this group’s operating expenses. Not just the money I helped steal, but the money stolen by the various other payroll moles. All that was simply a way to raise the working capital. A temporary, regrettable expedient.

  The nineteen other names were, however, the more important ones. Although in those cases there were real employees, drawing real salaries and paying real taxes, their pay slips and so on were being generated not by the real version of the TPS software, but by Tinker’s rip-off version. I needed to monitor the results so that any errors in the software could be immediately checked and corrected.

  I’m finally seeing the full scale of the crime whose gathering shadow I’ve been living in for so long. Finally understanding who and what we’re up against. I also realize that if my colleagues and I ever allow Henderson and friends to hit their Fuck It button, we’ll be guilty of permitting the greatest crime on earth to take place under our noses. We have to let things run far enough that we can round up the perpetrators, but not so far that they can launch their attack. Like watching terrorists. The same delicate clockwork of risk.

  The work is intense, and the schedule relentless. We work from twelve to two, break for sandwiches. Then two-thirty to five. Break for tea and biscuits. Then five-thirty to eight. The group had been running for three hours before Quintrell and I joined it.

  Because our group is the largest one, we get the biggest and nicest room: the same one in which I caused a scene yesterday. When I’m bored by the talk of dummy classes and UI objects, I gaze around. That raw oak, stone wall, copper lamp thing is nice. Quietly expensive. Tasteful.

  But there are other groups running elsewhere. There’s one upstairs, because people come and go in the gallery above our heads. Sometimes stand there talking quietly and casting glances down at us. That’s the ‘distribution’ group, I think. At times, one or two of Ram’s boys go to join the distribution people upstairs, because product design and distribution need to be carefully coordinated.

  I don’t see anything of the finance and security meetings. I think they take place in the farmhouse. I’m pretty sure that my earlier suspicion is correct: that only the those in the innermost circle are allowed into the farmhouse.

  And who is in the inner group? The million dollar question.

  The annoying thing is that I probably saw them. I think they were here, in this room, yesterday: the handful of white faces who left the room when I burst in. The people whose absence was important enough that Henderson was checking that they were vacating even when I was ripping chunks out of his hair and ripping grooves dow
n the side of his face.

  I wonder if Henderson was worried that I might recognize them from somewhere. Or if it was just his instinct for perfect security at all times.

  Could be the latter. Could be the former.

  The only way to find out is to break into the farmhouse, but I seriously doubt my ability to do that and exit alive.

  If I had Lev here, and enough weapons, we might chance it, but I don’t have Lev, I don’t have a weapon and I’ve no idea about the layout of the farm and farmhouse.

  I notice that Geoff or Allan are always lingering at the top of the stairs, in easy view of the barn door, which is always locked and is released only by a six-digit code entered in a keypad to the side. Both men are always armed. Both trim enough too. Short-haired, alert, plenty of muscle. Military types, by the look of them, and comfortable with those handguns. The shutters over the big barn windows are bolted and padlocked.

  I can forget about trying to get out of the farmhouse alive. Truth is, I probably wouldn’t be able to get out of the barn.

  The first day seems long, but we find a rhythm.

  Quintrell and I are essential in terms of determining exactly what the software system needs to deliver, but we add nothing of value to the business of figuring out how to make it do so. Increasingly, therefore, after that long first day, we end up spending time in our bedrooms or in the common room, available to be called on as required. Neither of us watch TV all that much. We ask Geoff if he can get books or magazines for us. He can’t, but Henderson comes over from the farmhouse with a stack of board games, and Quintrell and I find ourselves playing an endless game of Monopoly. Whenever one of us has too much money, we give it back to the bank or to the other. Whenever the board is getting too built up, we have a property clearance session, and tear down houses and hotels, foreclose on railways and utilities, strip the board back to something like its original nakedness.

  I go to jail six times on my first day. After that I lose count.