The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

  There’s not much traffic. Whatever is there moves at the edge of the speed limit, or just a little more. I’m not particularly good with car makes and models, but I put any obvious commercial vehicles to one side – vans, milk floats, lorries – and pay attention to the rest. Try to keep a log of them using three letters from their licence plate. Silver Volvo HGM. Burgundy Corolla SSW. Repeat each identification in my head before dropping it from attention and turning to the next vehicle to pass.

  The city is quiet. Just my walking feet and these passing cars. A burr of engines, a splash of tyres. From somewhere beyond the Mynachdy Road, you can sense the river and the darkness of Bute Park. A deeper silence, owl-haunted.

  When cars approach, I turn my head as though shielding my eyes from the headlamps. I walk fast, but I walk fast anyway. At some point, I’m not sure when, it starts to rain again. A gentle drizzle.

  By the time I’m approaching the bridge over the railway line, I think maybe I’ve got this wrong. Perhaps they’re less careful than Brattenbury thought. Or somehow know about my cleaning job.

  As it turns out: neither.

  A silver Audi TT drives north, on the far side of the road. I catch its number plate as it passes. Silver Audi RBO. There’s a hesitation in its movement, as though its driver touched the brakes briefly on seeing me.

  I do nothing. Just walk on.

  At this point, the road has a raised central reservation and cars can’t simply do a U-turn. I don’t look round, but I do hear the car speed up, then brake hard. I’m guessing it’s making a turn by the Texaco garage. Sure enough, the same car, driving slowly now, passes again. Silver Audi RBO.

  I keep on walking.

  The car drives ahead and out of sight. It can’t do anything else, not really. Vic’s boys won’t have the resources to arrange a multi-vehicle surveillance given no notice at all, long before dawn on a Monday morning. And in any case, those things are hard to manage at a time when there’s virtually no traffic, virtually no pedestrians.

  I cross the bridge and go on walking.

  The Audi is parked up ahead on Blackweir Terrace, lights off. I walk straight past it. Want to glance into the windows, but don’t.

  Walk on until I’m out of sight of the car, then stop. Prop my bag on a low wall and root around for tobacco and cigarette papers. Roll a ciggy, then walk on, smoking.

  My cigarette ploy wasted a minute, maybe more, so the Audi gets its timings a little wrong. Passes me again before it really wants to. It goes past the left turn onto Colum Road, so I take the turn and start walking south towards the university buildings. I’m moving faster now, almost running.

  A few moments later, I hear a car enter the road behind me.

  I bolt into Colum Drive, a dead-end, as it happens, but unless you know this area you might not know that. Press myself against the doorway of the first building I come to.

  The Audi follows me into the cul-de-sac, then realises its mistake, but also realises it’s too late to make amends. It stops abruptly, tyres losing traction briefly on the wet road. When the car stops, it feels very still indeed. A composition in black, silver and glass.

  I step out from the doorway and approach. Tap on the car window. After a brief hesitation, the glass descends.

  There’s a woman at the wheel. Forties, maybe. Blonde. Shoulder-length hair held back in a grip. Blue woollen coat worn over a dark jumper.

  I kick the door. Hard. I’m wearing boots and kick hard enough to dent the panel.

  ‘Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘I’ve been . . . look, sorry, I’ve lost someone. I thought you might be her.’

  ‘You’ve lost someone?’ I kick the door again. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m . . . um . . . Alison.’

  I almost feel sorry for ‘Alison’. I don’t know what her role in the whole set-up is, but I’m pretty sure that motorised surveillance isn’t her particular sphere of excellence. I guess she was assigned to this chase just because she happened to be closest.

  ‘Alison? And who have you lost, Alison?’

  ‘Look, it was a mistake, OK?’

  ‘Who have you lost? You said you’d lost someone.’

  Alison hesitates and, to help her make up her mind, I kick her car again. Not the door this time, but the rear panel. It wasn’t a particularly good kick, but every dent is another four hundred quid on a car like this.

  She loses her patience. ‘Can you stop doing that?’ Her voice is shrill. She gets out to look at the damage and, I guess, keep me from doing any more.

  ‘Yes, if you stop fucking stalking me.’

  Kick.

  While we’re having our version of a catfight, a man walks past. Jeans and waxed jacket. Something carried under his arm.

  ‘You ladies all right?’

  A car rides down Colum Road behind us, illuminating our faces. We stare briefly into the glare.

  ‘Yeah, we’re all right,’ I say sulkily.

  The man goes. The car goes.

  Alison looks at her Audi with disbelief. ‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Just leave me alone, OK?’ I look at my watch. ‘You’re making me late.’

  ‘Late for what? I can give you a lift if you like.’ Alison sees a way to rescue something from this shambles. ‘To make up,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  Our stand-off prolongs itself for another moment. Her peace-making and my suspicion grapple in this rain-softened darkness.

  I throw my cigarette into a puddle. Sulkily tell Alison she can drop me at the top of Fitzalan Place.

  Get cautiously into her car, which smells of leather and new carpet. I sit in my wet coat and keep my bag on my lap. I don’t put my seatbelt on and a red warning light disapproves of my recklessness. Something pings.

  Alison drives smoothly. Puts her indicator on, even where the junctions are completely clear. The wipers silently clear the rain. Her face is slightly illuminated in red.

  ‘You’re up early,’ she says, trying again.

  I don’t answer.

  We pass through the silent university buildings, the grey stones of the National Museum. My beloved Cathays, the police HQ, is just a couple of blocks away. I’d love to catch even a glimpse of it, but don’t let myself stare.

  When she drops me, I say, ‘Look, sorry about your car, yeah? It’s just that stuff freaks me out.’

  On the other side of the road, there’s a knot of people in dark coats. The orange stab of a cigarette.

  ‘Meeting someone?’ says Alison.

  She really, really isn’t very good at this.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I’m meeting friends.’

  I cross the road. Eight women. Nine including me. It’s four fifty-five and my cleaning day is about to start. Over the road, the Audi sits there, hazard lights blinking, as Alison phones through the results of her morning adventures.

  Who are you, Alison? I wonder. I’m fairly sure I’m about to find out.

  22

  A long working day.

  From five to eight thirty, office cleaning. Acres of open cubicles under fluorescent tube lighting. A million yards of nylon carpet. A thousand dustbins. A hundred bathrooms, ceramics gleaming, floor tiles astonishing in their whiteness.

  I do my stuff. Don’t get praised or rebuked. My main cleaning partner is a woman, Lowri, who seems sour. She does all the hoovering. I do the bins and most of the dusting. She wipes her nose and tells me about her allergies.

  At half-eight, I use the Ladies to change into something a bit more formal for the office: skirt and jacket in place of trousers and a fleece. Get peppermint tea and a pastry from a coffee shop. Am at my desk in Western Vale by just before nine.

  Do my payroll work, which I go on finding hard to love. It’s as though we live in some bureaucrats’ heaven, where people, names, dates of birth flow over our desk and through our hands in a stream that has no start and no end. HMRC floats over our every transaction like the remote
but threatening God of some failing Amazonian tribe.

  We pay homage and buy hot drinks from a vending machine at 20p a cup.

  Yesterday, I did the thing that Henderson paid me a grand to do. Nothing illegal. Not at this stage. He simply wanted me to change the assignment list that our department head, Krissy Philips, keeps on a spreadsheet in her office. There’s no particular magic about that list. Mostly it’s just a way of making sure that work is divided evenly between Philips’s worker bees. When everyone else went to lunch, I just waited around, pretending I had a personal call to make. Then just walked into Philips’s office, pulled up the spreadsheet, and switched forty-eight names from other people to me. Switched the same number of my names back to them, so no one’s total workload was either greater or less. The whole thing took seven minutes. One person, not from our department, entered while I was working, then went away again when he saw the place empty.

  The switch of names means that the twenty-nine false payroll accounts now come under my jurisdiction. I haven’t yet falsified anything. All I’ve done so far is ensure that no one else in the department will locate the fraud and expose it.

  When I’d done what Henderson asked, I called him on his mobile and told him. He told me to meet him that evening at The Grape and The Grain, gave me a thousand pounds in cash, told me I’d done well. Said there might be more jobs down the road.

  He offered me a drink. I said no and he didn’t press. He didn’t say anything more about the immigration lawyer and I didn’t ask. Just walked out into the night, holding my bag tight against my side.

  The next morning, I paid the money into my Post Office savings account. Any spare money I have left over at the end of the week goes in the same place. When I take my laptop to the library in the evenings, I check out immigration lawyers. And it’s true: immigration law is basically a matter of cash. Pay the right guy enough and he’ll find a way to sneak you through the system. It’s good to know. I start making lists.

  One puzzle: Henderson asked me to switch forty-eight names, but Brattenbury is only aware of a fraud affecting twenty-nine. When we met on Saturday, Brattenbury promised to check his figures but neither he nor I have an easy explanation of the discrepancy.

  At eleven this morning, the internal mail comes round. There’s an envelope for me – from Brattenbury, though nothing says so. Inside, a single sheet. A map of my studio apartment. Dotted lines mark out the expected field of vision of Henderson’s surveillance. It’s good news, on the whole. He can see the entire living area of the apartment, but not much of the bed and the area where I usually get changed is also out of sight. I realise that if I move the wardrobe by just a few inches, I’ll shield the bed completely.

  I put the sheet aside with some other documents. Forty minutes later, take the whole stack to the shredder and destroy the lot.

  At lunchtime, I ‘forget’ my mobile and use a colleague’s phone to text Buzz. OK TO DELIVER GOODS. FXXX. Delete the text from the Sent folder. Return the phone.

  Work hard. But by four o’clock, I’m yawning. I’ve been up for twelve hours and working for nearly eleven. I drink peppermint tea and look at spreadsheets.

  Leave at five. Buy some groceries and a sandwich. Buy a coat hook for the back of the door.

  Walk home through Bute Park. Walk aimlessly. Watch the river from the bridge. Move between the formal beds and the long wooded walks. I can’t see anyone following me, and I come into Bute Park often enough that my movements won’t look suspicious.

  I eat my sandwich next to some bushes by the river. Throw bits of bread to some waterbirds – two coots and some sort of wagtail – but they treat my offerings with contempt. Next to me, in the dark of the bushes, an envelope gleams white. I reach for it and put it in my bag. Throw the rest of my sandwich away and the wagtail, alarmed, flies off downriver.

  That evening, I go to Jason’s flat and offer to make supper for us. He says, OK and do we need anything? I say no, but show him the coat hook and where I want it.

  As he starts to wrestle with my bradawl, I start to cook.

  Start to cook, but also float over to his computer, which is switched on. Open up his web browser. Click Options on the browser menu, then select Security. The Security tab should really be called an Insecurity tab because, among other flim-flam, it asks if I want to see Saved Passwords. I do. Get a list of sites – only about a quarter of them porno – with stored usernames. I click the button that offers to Show Passwords. It says, ‘Are you sure?’ which doesn’t strike me as the world’s most testing security interrogation. I select ‘Yes’ and a complete list appears on screen.

  OLIVIA06.

  The name of his daughter and the year of her birth. A single password controlling a million different accounts. Thank you, Olivia. Thank you, Jason. The simple perils of fatherly love.

  I close everything and go back to the stove.

  That night before I go to bed, I throw open my window and make myself a joint, a big one, fat with hash.

  Smoke it, slowly, with a cup of peppermint tea and a box of chocolates – a little extra gift from Buzz – on the arm of the chair.

  Normally at this stage in a murder investigation, I’m very well acquainted with the victims. Have their faces pinned up by my desk. At home, even. The faces of the dead, photographed at the scene of their death. Postcards sent from their world to ours.

  I find it strange, disorienting, not having those images available to me. It seems almost irreverent to go chasing off after murderers without the victims at the cold dead centre of the chase. A wedding without a bride. A feast without wine.

  I’ve also felt uncomfortable being so far removed from Brattenbury’s inquiry. From one perspective, of course, I’m the steel point on the tip of SOCA’s javelin. The thing that forces entry, opens the flesh, does the damage. But I’m also a copper and a Cambridge graduate. The policewoman in me wants to see the inquiry’s records. To see the data remorselessly collecting. Lists of names, dates, phone calls, bank transfers. Witness statements and officers’ reports. The Cambridge graduate in me likes the same thing. Puts her trust in paperwork, the primary sources for any inquiry.

  It’s not even that Brattenbury can’t keep me abreast of these things in the limited time we have available, it’s that he doesn’t want to. The undercover operating manual says that the more fully I live in role, the less likely I am to commit an error. So Brattenbury tells me the minimum, tries to restrict every investigative impulse I have.

  He’s a good investigator, but careful. And I don’t do well with careful.

  I eat a chocolate, finish my joint, finish my tea, get ready for bed.

  I’m conscious of Henderson’s camera now, but not paranoid. If I pass it in my underwear, I don’t care too much. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve got weapons of my own.

  When Jason fixed the coat hook on my door, the extra protrusion meant it kept banging up against the wardrobe. So we shifted the wardrobe sideways. Only a few inches, but enough.

  In the envelope Buzz left for me was the iPad my dad gave me for Christmas, also the cash, and also the name of a street in Llandaff, just across the river from here.

  In bed, under the duvet, hidden from Henderson’s gaze, I turn the iPad on, wait for it to scout out the local wireless networks. It finds a few – it would do in here – and I poke around until I find Jason’s. The system asks me for a password and I offer it Jason’s tender homage to his daughter. OLIVIA06.

  The tablet thinks about that, then admits me, unaccusingly, to the world of the digital. Working under the duvet, I start to explore the world I’ve been missing.

  A world of investigation and the faces of the dead.

  23

  Pontcanna. One of those posh streets that run down alongside Cathedral Road. I’m sitting on a doorstep, or Fiona Grey is. Same old coat, same old bag. Plane trees not yet in leaf, but you can feel them getting ready. A hidden murmur.

  It’s eleven fifteen in the morning.

 
I’ve been here two hours.

  In the house behind me lives ‘Alison’. Real name: Anna Quintrell. Occupation: dodgy accountant. Having internet access via my iPad means that I can, finally, get to see the data being assembled by Brattenbury’s team. When I had my run-in with Quintrell, Brattenbury’s guys were there to document it. The man in a waxed jacket who asked us if we were all right was one of his men. So was the driver who fixed us in his headlights, a simple way to ensure that his partner’s video was properly lit.

  The Audi was registered to Anna Quintrell, address here in Pontcanna. A basic PNC check revealed that Quintrell was cited in a major false accounting case three years back. She escaped conviction because of errors made by the CPS during prosecution, but she was kicked out of the Association of Chartered Accountants and must have had difficulty earning an honest crust since that point.

  According to the Tinker case notes, Quintrell’s house will soon be, and perhaps already is, under surveillance. I imagine they won’t enter the house itself – that would be too crude for Brattenbury – but they’ll find a way to enter one of the houses to either side. Perhaps both. Before Christmas, when I was still getting briefed, one of the SOCA technical guys told me they can do the whole job – enter the house, place the bug, make good, withdraw – in ten to fifteen minutes. They don’t even need to enter the suspect’s property, which means the chance of detection is close to zero.

  But Fiona Grey can’t rely on police data for her info. When I was at work, I called the various different Audi garages in Cardiff, saying that I’d brought an Audi TT in for repairs to the bodywork. The first two garages blanked me. The receptionist at the third said, ‘Ah yes, Anna Quintrell, isn’t it?’ I said yes and complained that I hadn’t yet had an estimate through. The receptionist apologised and said she was sure one had been sent. I asked them to confirm where they were sending it and the woman gave me the address whose doorstep I’m sitting on now.