The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

Deception is so easy, I wonder why it isn’t more common.

  Time moves on.

  Plane trees print abstract shapes on the pavement. Kids pass, with mothers in tow. A delivery man brings a parcel to the house across the street.

  I think Quintrell is at home. She didn’t answer the door when I arrived, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard movements from within. There are net curtains on the windows.

  According to the Tinker case notes, the mole at Fielding Insurance has been arrested, meaning that Roy Williams is about to ‘go live’.

  I think about Hayley Morgan. I’ve looked at all the scene-of-crime photos now, about a million times. There’s something beautifully quiet in the lighting. The gentle light of a Vermeer painting. Filtered by glass, falling on slate flags, finding the sheen in cooking pots and old plaster. All that, and Hayley Morgan’s little corpse. Restrained and peaceful, like a scatter of apples on a linen cloth.

  I haven’t really got to know her. I’d like to visit her again.

  At twelve thirty, a police car glides up the road and stops. A couple of uniforms step out and approach me. I don’t recognise them, nor they me.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Been here a while, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’m waiting for someone.’

  They ask my name and who I’m waiting for and what my business is. I answer ‘Fiona Jones’ to the first question: Fiona Grey is a wanted woman. The other questions I don’t have to answer, so I don’t. The officers try to get me to go away and come back later. Demand to see ID. I do have my Fiona Grey ID on me, as it happens, but I don’t have to hand it over, so I don’t. I’m not committing any offence by being here so there’s nothing anyone can do to shift me. They hassle me a bit more, then retreat to their patrol car and sit there another minute or two, lights flashing. When the car leaves, the street feels very empty. In the house diagonally opposite me, a woman comes to the front door, stares at me for thirty seconds, then disappears again.

  I like this street. I think maybe plane trees are my favourite sort.

  When one of the mums returns from wherever she’s been, minus the kids this time, I smile at her but she looks away.

  At two fifteen, a black BMW noses down the road and parks. Vic Henderson gets out, straightens his jacket, blips his car locked. He starts walking towards me, but before he does, there’s just a brief moment where he settles his expression. His face is now smoothed into a friendly, civilised, let’s-all-be-reasonable look, but I don’t think that’s what it was saying when I first noticed it. He was twenty yards away from me, perhaps more, and the moment was fleeting, but I think there was something fierce in that face. Something brutal.

  An easy violence.

  I try to keep everything out of my expression. No hope, no surprise, no fear, no expectation.

  The little path up to the front step is paved in two-inch tiles, black and white. A black-painted iron gate. Henderson has his hand on the latch before he speaks.

  ‘Fiona.’

  I shrug, or half shrug. I don’t even know if the movement is visible through my coat.

  ‘You’ve been here a while, eh?’

  Shrug.

  ‘OK. Let’s go in.’

  ‘She’s not there.’

  ‘I think you might be wrong about that.’

  Henderson rings on the doorbell, then steps to the window and raps on it, putting his face to the glass so whoever’s inside can see him if they choose to.

  A moment later, the door unlocks. Anna Quintrell – ‘Alison’ – opens it. She stares down at me. She’s wearing a red skirt and dark top. Make-up, hair glossily perfect. When I saw her before, she didn’t look like this, but I imagine she’d been pulled out of bed at very short notice. She looked good, given that.

  Quintrell says, ‘Come in.’ Henderson stands between me and the road. I have a sudden sense of being herded.

  I stand, awkwardly nervous, until Quintrell steps back. The hallway opens up. I hesitate a moment longer, then step inside.

  They lead me through to the kitchen. A surprisingly large modern extension. Big windows looking out onto one of those Japanese-style modern gardens. Slatted decking, potted ferns, concealed lighting.

  No one asks me to sit, so I stand there, in my coat, holding my bag against my belly.

  Henderson and Quintrell exchange glances. Then it’s Henderson, not Quintrell, who asks, ‘Do you want anything to drink?’

  I do one of my invisible shrugs, then clear my throat. Say, ‘I’ll have a glass of water, please.’

  Quintrell gets me a glass. I sit down at the kitchen table. Some blond wood, Nordic thing. The sort that looks almost identical to an IKEA table but costs five times more.

  Henderson tells Quintrell to make him coffee, then says, ‘Fiona, we’re not very happy with you. Not happy at all.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘Now Anna and I have colleagues. And we’ve been talking about you. A long and difficult discussion, if I’m honest.’

  I say nothing. Quintrell stands by her Italian coffee maker and does whatever you have to do to make those things work.

  ‘There are two schools of thought,’ Henderson continues. ‘School one says you’re more trouble than you’re worth. We make a call to your bosses, tell them to give you a drug test, have you removed from Western Vale. Perhaps we also give your name to the police, just to see if they’re interested.’

  I don’t know what my face shows at that. What I do know is that Fiona Grey feels frightened. Actual fear that tightens up the belly, sends its cold fingers into the capillaries and nerve endings.

  That’s a good reaction, of course. Fiona Grey is a ‘person wanted in connection with’ a stabbing in Manchester. If the police who arrived earlier had taken my ID, the system would have flagged me up and they’d have taken me into custody, awaiting further instructions from their colleagues in Greater Manchester.

  But more interesting to me is the way I feel Fiona Grey’s emotions more easily than my own. I’ve been frightened before, of course, and fear is one of the feelings that, I think, I identify more reliably than some others. But still. Fiona Grey feels fear and – boom! – it’s there throughout her body. She feels it with an immediacy and naturalness that I seldom manage on my own account.

  I don’t know what my face shows, but it shows something.

  I can tell that Henderson is pleased.

  ‘Of course, if you have nothing to hide, the police won’t be interested, will they?’

  I still don’t say anything, so he continues.

  ‘The second school of thought says we give you another chance. A chance to show us that you can do what we need you to do. Without causing problems. Without doing twelve hundred pounds’ worth of damage to Anna’s car here. And without causing a scene at her home address. Getting the police called out.’

  He stares at me. A vivisectionist pondering where to make the next incision.

  Quintrell comes to the table with two of those tiny white espresso cups. I grip my water. I haven’t yet touched it.

  Stare at Henderson.

  ‘And I’d love to tell you that we’ve come to a decision. But we haven’t. We really haven’t.’

  ‘What you did to my car was totally uncalled for.’ Quintrell has a taut asperity in her voice. A wintriness. ‘It was vandalism, pure and simple.’

  ‘The question is,’ says Henderson, ‘what you can do to put things right. Whether you want to put things right.’

  This is bullying. There’s not even a would-you-like-a-drink pretence about it now. Henderson has an unconcealed aggression that seems natural to him. Quintrell isn’t physically threatening in the same way, but there’s something cruel in the room now. Blood in the water and a skirmish of sharks.

  I say, sulkily, ‘She followed me. I didn’t know she had anything to do with you.’

  ‘I don’t care. Do you understand that? I don’t care.’ Henderson forces me to look at him. ‘My colle
agues and I have a lot at stake here. You can help us or you can get in the way. If you get in the way, we will discard you. Do you understand?’

  I nod.

  ‘So,’ Henderson says. ‘We need an answer. Are you going to help us?’

  When I learned French at school – and I was never very good at languages – I remember a lesson on how to ask questions. You could create a question by sticking Est-ce que onto the start of a sentence. Or you could invert the subject and the verb. Or, simplest of all, you could just end your sentence with the phrase n’est-ce pas, but – and this was the bit that stuck with me – you could only do that if you were expecting the answer yes.

  At the time, that struck me as a weirdly pointless piece of grammar. Why ask a question to which you already knew the answer? But the more I’ve studied interrogation, the more I realise that the French have got it right. More than half the time, we ask questions whose answers we think we know. Often enough, you ask the question because you know the answer and because you want to force the other person to acknowledge that fact.

  This is one of those times.

  A question expecting the answer ‘yes’.

  I stare down at my hands. Don’t catch Henderson’s eye. I mumble, ‘I don’t know what you want. I don’t know anything about you.’

  I can’t see anything except my hands white around my water glass. A spread of expensive Scandinavian table. But I somehow feel an exchange of glances over my head. I don’t know what those glances say, but Henderson rips into an old-fashioned police-style grilling, each question coming at me fast, hard and low.

  I don’t change position. Speak my answers into my glass or just move my head.

  ‘You took a job cleaning. Why?’

  ‘Earn some money.’

  ‘Did you tell Western Vale?’

  Head-shake.

  ‘Are you planning to keep both jobs?’

  Nod.

  ‘But you didn’t tell me. Why not?’

  Shrug.

  ‘I said why not?’

  ‘I didn’t know I was meant to.’

  ‘Well you know now, don’t you? If you work for us, we need to know what you’re up to. At all times. Do you understand?’

  Nod. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You go to the homeless hostel still, even though you’re no longer homeless. Why?’

  ‘People. There are courses and stuff. And just to hang out.’

  He probes away at that. I let him find out about Boothby. I realise that Brattenbury will now kill those weekly ‘mentoring’ visits. Too much of a security risk. I can’t say I’m sorry, but I realise I’ve half-deliberately severed another link with my previous life. Another connection to Planet Normal.

  Henderson gets a who’s who of my friends at the hostel, then moves on to other things.

  ‘Why were you worried by Anna’s car? Why did you react the way you did?’

  ‘She was stalking me.’ I say that a bit angrily. Or defiantly. But I don’t shift my gaze from the glass in front of me.

  ‘So you did twelve hundred pounds’ worth of damage?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say who she was. She freaked me out.’

  Henderson allows that answer to stand for a moment or two before he resumes.

  ‘You found out her name and address. Why?’

  ‘I was freaked out. I said.’

  ‘How did you obtain the information?’

  ‘I rang the garage.’

  ‘How did you know which garage?’

  ‘I rang all of them.’

  Another short pause. Henderson, I assume, knows what I’ve just said to be true. If he can hear my phone calls from work and see what I do on the computer, then he has pretty full insight into my affairs.

  ‘And you came here why?’

  ‘I didn’t want to be scared. I thought if I came . . .’

  ‘You thought if you came, what?’

  ‘I’d find out what was going on. I thought . . . You don’t know how scary it is. It was four in the morning and she was being weird.’

  There’s a pause. A change of tempo. Into the silence, I say, ‘Is it all right if I smoke? Sorry. I can go outside.’

  Again, that unseen exchange of glances over my head. Quintrell says, ‘You can go into the garden if you like. Don’t leave your cigarette butt lying around.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I get up. Meekly. Head for the garden but can’t manage the sliding door. Have to wait for Quintrell, tsking, to rescue me. I say thank you again.

  Outside, amongst the glazed earthenware and ornamental bamboos, I roll a cigarette and start smoking it. I have a bit of weed with me but, though I’m tempted, don’t add that to the mix. Inside, in the kitchen, Henderson and Quintrell are locked in serious conversation. Henderson makes a phone call, keeps darting glances out at me.

  I smoke one cigarette fast and needily, then a second one more slowly.

  I quite like this garden. It’s paved in some kind of stone, edged in brick, and has a stone bench shaded by next door’s magnolia. The day isn’t sunny, but it’s trying. It’s halfway there.

  I wonder what Kureishi’s house was like. The house he had before he went on the run. Before he ended up in an end-of-season let in Devon, taped to a chair and his life’s blood spurting from his wrists. I usually get to see those things. It’s odd working undercover and being so remote from the corpses.

  When I’ve finished my second cigarette, I gather up the two butts and the matches into a Rizla paper and stand outside the kitchen door waiting to be readmitted.

  Henderson finishes his phone call, none too hurried, then signals to Quintrell that she can let me back in.

  I throw the cigarette bits away, then sit back at the table. I keep my eyes forty-five degrees below the horizontal and say to Quintrell, ‘I’m sorry about your car.’

  Henderson likes that. ‘Good. OK. Good. That’s a better attitude. Now, Anna, remind me exactly how much the car cost to fix.’

  ‘Nine eighty, plus VAT. Eleven seventy-six, all told.’

  ‘OK. Fiona, we gave you a thousand pounds last week for doing five minutes’ work. I think you need to give that to Anna. I’m sure she’ll be happy to overlook the rest, won’t you, Anna?’

  ‘Yes. A thousand would be fine.’

  ‘Fiona?’

  I nod. Sulkily: ‘OK.’

  ‘Good. That’s settled. Now look, Fiona, we’ve decided we would like to try to work with you again. One more chance. If you behave yourself, there’ll be a lot more money to come. More money and we’ll help with your emigration. Our promise to you is that, if you do well over the next year, we’ll make it possible for you to leave the country to wherever it is you want to go. We’ll pay for the lawyer. If we need to provide proof of any training qualifications, we’ll arrange for that too.’

  He goes on. Tells me, and my two recording devices, exactly what he wants. Looking after what he calls my ‘portfolio’ of payroll assignments. He tells me, in plain English, that some of the people receiving salaries are fictional.

  ‘That doesn’t need to affect you,’ he says. ‘We need you to keep their tax records up to date, enter their overtime payments, all the stuff you would normally do. Can you manage that?’

  I nod.

  ‘It’s stealing. You realise that? There’s no point in doing this if you’re going to lose your nerve.’

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ I mumble.

  He stares at me. His gaze is a laser-sight roving over my face and forehead. A red dot tracking the contours.

  ‘You may find that some of the names aren’t fictional,’ he says. ‘About thirty names are fictional. The rest are real. But we need you to treat them much the same way. If any questions arise about those names, if anyone challenges you, or if you notice any unusual activity, you tell me at once.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And I mean at once, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I need you to stay in communication with us, me or Anna,
all the time. One of us will meet you every week and we’ll check over your portfolio. If your employment arrangements vary, or if you want to take a holiday, or if you have a day off sick, or you want to leave Cardiff, you tell us before you do anything. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can contact us by simply sending an email to yourself from your computer at work. We will be able to see that email. Don’t put anything secret in that email. Just say, for example, “I need a sick day” or “please can we talk” and we’ll do the rest. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And from time to time, we will keep an eye on you. That might be Anna, or it might be me, or it might be someone else.’

  ‘I don’t want to be followed.’

  ‘As long as you work for us, we want to be sure that you are working for us and no one else.’

  ‘I still don’t think you should stalk me. It’s creepy.’

  Henderson says, with emphasis, ‘I don’t care what you think. If we want to keep an eye on you, we will. If you notice us – and you probably won’t – you will not overreact the way you did on Monday. Is that clear?’

  Shrug. Mumble. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You need to mean that. I should warn you, we can be quite tough with colleagues who don’t do as they’ve promised.’

  I shrug.

  ‘And I do mean tough. You wouldn’t like it.’

  I don’t react to that much. The way Henderson says what he says makes me think he either is the man who killed Kureishi or a very intimate conspirator. Either way, a murderer in my books.

  ‘That also means that as far as you are concerned, you’ve never met me, never met Anna. Do you understand?’

  I give him something that’s halfway between a shrug or a nod.

  He studies me a moment longer, then unpins his gaze. ‘Good. Excellent.’ His signal for a change of mood. Enough bullying. Now for phoney-niceness. Except I don’t respond the way I’m meant to.

  I stay stubbornly silent for a moment or two. Then, ‘You haven’t told me what I’m getting.’

  ‘We’re going to pay you properly. And, if you perform well, we’ll arrange for your emigration. I’ve said that.’