The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

‘I need to know how much.’

  Henderson tries to divert me, but Fiona Grey isn’t to be diverted. She hangs tough. Henderson offers a grand a month plus an immigration visa to an English-speaking country in twelve months’ time. Fiona Grey holds out for three grand a month, plus the visa. We end up settling at a thousand a month for the first four months. Then two for the next four. Then two point five grand a month for the next four.

  I insist on writing it down. Ask for the name of the lawyer. Ask for details of when I’ll get my visa, what’s involved, what Henderson means when he says he’ll provide proof of my training qualifications.

  He answers with increasing terseness, but his answers indicate that he’s done his research, that he knows what he’s talking about. To the last question, he says simply, ‘If we need to fabricate something, we will.’

  ‘Fabricate? You mean, make something up?’

  ‘Yes. Provide false documents, that sort of thing.’

  When I have the main points written down – on the back of an envelope that Quintrell has fished from her bin – I get Henderson to initial them.

  I can feel I’m angering him, but the anger is good. A police spy would have made all this easier. A police spy wouldn’t have sat for five hours on a suspect’s doorstep. Fiona Grey may be difficult to manage, but she’s beginning to earn these people’s trust.

  And when we’re done, when Fiona has her ‘contract’ tucked into her bag, she asks, ‘Where’s the nearest Post Office, please?’

  Quintrell says that there’s one at the top of Pontcanna Street.

  Fiona says, ‘I’ll get your money.’

  And we all troop out together. A warm afternoon. The plane trees are still marking shadows on the pavement. I get the money and hand it over. Henderson and Quintrell walk away together, talking animatedly.

  As for me, this is my first day of approximate holiday since Florida: although I turned up at my cleaning shift as normal at 4.00 am, I told Western Vale that I wasn’t coming in that day. I celebrate my freedom by buying a sandwich and a bottle of orange juice. Take them to Llandaff Fields and eat by the weir, where the black water breaks into a temporary, troubled white.

  Life is good, I think. But when I bring Buzz to mind – try to remember what he looks like, what he feels like – I retrieve nothing but shadows.

  I try thinking about our engagement. Our theoretical wedding. Me in a white dress, a veil, a froth of petticoats. Buzz, dark-suited, next to me, speaking his responses with that broad-chested male confidence. Shapes beyond us in the dimness: friends, family, those people you have to invite.

  The whole idea seems inconceivably distant. Like something half recalled from childhood. Disney misremembered.

  I do what I always do to centre myself. Breathing exercises. Try to feel my body. And allow my mind to seek sanctuary in the places it finds most restful. Hayley Morgan’s tiny body, Kureishi’s anguished surprise. Those things help a bit, but not as much as usual. I think, It’s not surprising. I’m Fiona Grey now. Fiona Griffiths is hardly even here sometimes. There are whole days when I barely remember that I’m her. A strange death this, to be alive in theory and present so little in the ways that matter.

  A strange death this, for me who has been so strangely dead before.

  I eat my sandwich and black water streams endlessly to the sea.

  24

  May. Wet and cold. The year began with warnings of drought, but already flooding has affected thousands of homes. Power lines have been down. Rivers gurgle through living rooms. In Somerset, a pub landlord shows a TV reporter the dead fish he found floating behind his bar.

  I don’t mind the weather. It suits me, suits Fiona Grey. The two of us settle further into our odd life, making our home here.

  I buy more boots from a charity shop, hoping these ones are more waterproof.

  I’ve expanded my repertoire of one-pot cooking until I’m almost competent. Jason and I take turns to cook for each other. He’s better than I am, but we enjoy the company.

  Meantime, my Saturdays at the hostel go on being beautiful things, all the better because Brattenbury does indeed cancel his weekly visits as a security precaution. I use the extra time to start my Anger and Anxiety Management course, which is surprisingly useful. Our tutor gives us a handout with Ten Things to Remember printed out on bright yellow paper and I stick it up on my fridge. I look at it most nights.

  Clementina and I are knocked out of the table football tournament in the first round, because she had been out drinking the night before and couldn’t focus very well. I was useless, as always, but it was nice being part of a team.

  And I am now for the first time, guilty of criminal fraud.

  I start to manage my portfolio as Henderson and Quintrell instruct me. Sometimes I’m told to go to Quintrell’s house and I sit there in her kitchen, at her fancy Scandinavian table, showing her copies of payslips and HMRC input forms. She gives me a glass of water, but never offers me anything else to eat or drink. She doesn’t use my name ever. Never says please or thank you. Just checks my work. Says, ‘OK,’ if it’s all right and, ‘No, this is wrong,’ or ‘You’ve made an error,’ if there’s something she wants me to change.

  If the phone rings or there’s something she needs to do on the computer, I just sit and wait till she’s finished or ask to go out in the garden and have a smoke. Because she doesn’t like me leaving ash in her garden, I carry plastic bags in my coat pocket and make sure that I put any ash, matches and cigarette butts in there when I’m finished.

  Other times I meet Henderson. He’s nicer to me. We had our first ‘portfolio review’ meeting at The Grape and The Grain, and he kept trying to get me something to eat and drink. I had another orange juice and ate some of his olives. At the end of that session, he said, ‘I don’t think you like it here, do you?’

  I said, ‘It’s OK.’

  He said, ‘We could do it somewhere else if you liked. We could do it at your place?’

  I said OK, but he wasn’t to let himself in. He had to come when I was there. So far, he’s come, good as gold, at the appointed time and waited outside for me to let him in. I quite like him, is the truth of it. I often like the bad guys.

  Brattenbury I’ve seen just the once. It was five in the morning. I entered one of my corporate washrooms, ready to clean it, and found him sitting on the row of basins. He gave me a bollocking for my stunt with Anna Quintrell, but his performance wasn’t up to Dennis Jackson’s standards, not remotely. Too English and too polite, somehow. All Oxbridgey cricket whites, where Jackson is a mud-splattered rugby red.

  I said, ‘Yes sir,’ when I needed to, and kept glancing sideways to inspect the state of the bathroom.

  When Brattenbury was finished, we shared a moment’s silence.

  I said, ‘You’ve been surveilling Henderson, of course . . .’

  ‘Yes. And got nothing. We can’t push it too hard, because we can’t let him identify us. He burns off any vehicle-based pursuit. So we followed him with a chopper. He pulled into a filling station, one of the sort with a big overhead canopy. Left in a different vehicle. Same thing with his phone. He uses disposable phones and encrypted lines. It’s rare, that level of care. Unusual.’

  ‘That’s bad luck, that is.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, a careful criminal and a reckless undercover officer. What are the chances?’

  He laughs at that and the mood changes.

  I say, ‘Look, you won’t want to know this, but I’ve got an iPad.’

  ‘What?’

  I tell him. That I’ve got an iPad. That it’s fully secured with a sixteen digit alphanumeric password. That I get network access via a neighbour.

  ‘You asked a neighbour for his password?’ Brattenbury is incredulous.

  So am I. ‘No. I stole it. I’ll work better if I’m kept in the loop.’

  I can see Brattenbury wondering whether to fire off another lecture at me, but it’s too early in the morning for all
of that. He asks where I keep the tablet – behind the radiator in the shared bathroom is the answer – and tells me he’ll sort out a better hiding place.

  I say, ‘They found Quintrell by looking around for a not-too-scrupulous accountant. A simple Google search, quite likely. When Kureishi went walkabout, they’d have needed an IT guy in a hurry. They might have found one the same way.’

  Brattenbury considers that. The ANPR systems – Automatic Number Plate Recognition – are nationwide and hold data for years. In principle, if Henderson and Quintrell drove to recruit a none-too-clean IT guy, a combination of careful computer searches and ANPR tracking could provide a big clue as to who they took on board.

  ‘Good thought. We’ll look into it.’

  He eases himself off the basin unit with a grimace. He’s wearing suede shoes, chinos, a pale blue herringbone shirt and a dark jacket. No tie. I start to unload cleaning bottles from my trolley, ready to start on the mirrors.

  He says, ‘You’re nuts, taking this cleaning job. Any time you want to quit . . .’

  I shake my head. ‘You’re wrong, actually. I’m just nuts, full stop.’

  ‘I’ve got a present for you, by the way. I wasn’t sure how to deliver it, but you seem to have solved that problem.’

  A present? I stare at Brattenbury, suddenly hungry.

  He nods. ‘Mr Griffiths and Mr Glyn. There’s a lot of material. On your dad mostly, but . . . I’ll beam it over to you.’

  His words have an odd effect on me. Palms wettening. Pulse increasing. I recognise the tickle of fear, but there’s something else here as well.

  I say, ‘You know when you’re excited? That’s quite like being scared, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like they’re next-door feelings, almost the same thing.’

  Brattenbury stares at me, as though I’ve said something strange. He doesn’t say anything, but his face tells me yes. He looks at me a moment longer then drops his eyes. Picks up a bottle of glass cleaner, as though studying the ingredients.

  ‘Take care, Fiona. These cases do get to people. Even when they think they’re immune.’

  I say whatever it is I think I’m meant to say. Then watch him leave. Brown brogues and ironed chinos. A mirror person walking in a mirror world. I pick up my cloths and start to clean.

  25

  Mr Griffiths and Mr Glyn.

  My father and a man who once came to the police with a story about city council corruption. A story that was investigated and for which no firm evidence was ever found. A man who – years later – vanished without trace. His wife, a slightly crazed woman with depressive and obsessive tendencies aplenty, alleges, again without evidence, that he was murdered. By whom, she doesn’t know.

  Not much to work with, but it’s all I’ve got.

  And that night, working under the covers of my bed, I use my iPad to explore the trove sent to me by Brattenbury. Police files, old databases, paper records scanned into the digital age. Ancient caves, explored by lamplight.

  SOCA inherited the files that were originally compiled by the old Regional Crime Squads. Those squads have a faintly dated feel to them now. They somehow recall the era of bubble perms, flared jeans, loose fists and misogyny. But in their day, those RCSs were as good as they got. Well-resourced, well-trained, and they broke some huge cases.

  Much of that old data has already been available to me via normal police routes, but not all of it. And given that my father was a target of intense police investigation and surveillance for the best part of fifteen years, the two pools of data – the police set and the RCS one – are enormous. Simply comparing one collection against the other is a monumental task.

  It’s also one that I find hard to perform given the limitations I’m working under. I can’t take physical notes, because I can’t take the risk of Henderson finding them. I can take digital notes, but I can’t type fast on an iPad, especially not when lying clam-like between my lumpy mattress and my secondhand polyester duvet – nor can I even sit up to work, because I can’t allow Henderson or his team to see any hint of light from my screen.

  By the end of that first week exploring Brattenbury’s gift, I realise I need more breathing room, literal and figurative. I can’t do much Monday to Friday, because of my work commitments. I can’t do much on Saturday, because Saturdays are my day for the hostel, for my Anxiety and Anger Management course, for table football, for laundry, for smoking ciggies with Gary and, in general, for my entire social life outside cleaning, payroll and my once-monthly conjugal visit with Buzz.

  So that leaves Sunday. The one day of the week where I’ve never had a settled routine, where I’ve deliberately kept my movements a little random, unpredictable. Mostly, I’ve spent those Sundays walking. Bute Park sometimes. Along the Taff. Sometimes just frequented coffee shops in the city centre, or window-shopped, or smoked the occasional bit of weed with the hippy guy in the veggie café. Other times, I’ve roamed further afield. Gone down to the seashore. Fed the gulls. Been as far out as Penarth, where I’ve watched the brown waves beat against a brown shoreline as container ships ride the horizon.

  On some of these trips, I know I’ve been followed. Down at Hamadryad Park once, I saw Henderson’s own BMW, both when I entered and then two hours later as I was walking back up towards the hostel. On another occasion – the weekend before Henderson made contact – I saw a blue Astra once too often for it to be coincidence. The driver – male, thirty-something, army crew cut – looked just about right for one of Henderson’s cronies.

  I didn’t react. Didn’t do my Quintrell number on it. Just told Brattenbury via an audio message delivered through the library cloakroom. Gave him the number plate, let him trace it from there.

  But since those early inspections, I think Henderson has either dropped the direct surveillance, or cut it back hard. So, while I remain watchful, I think I have more freedom than I had.

  I use it.

  That Sunday, I have a lie-in, which means getting up at seven or even seven-thirty. Make breakfast and eat it at my Formica table. Read a bit. Sit at the window and stare out. Then take myself out for a wander. The kind of wander that looks utterly convincing, yet almost impossible to monitor with discretion. So I stop in front of shop windows. Enter pedestrianised areas, linger, then leave. Stop at a café, have a cup of tea, watch the road from the window, leave abruptly.

  I do all that and, by half past ten, I’m confident no one is following me. I enter the park by Blackweir Woods, cross the river, and walk rapidly up into Llandaff. No one could follow me by car, because the parks and river crossing are pedestrian-only. There are few people about and none who I see more than once.

  In Llandaff, I go to the street address which Buzz gave me in the package with the iPad. There, as promised, stands my very sleek, very white Alfa Romeo Guilietta. I grope inside the rear wheel arch. Find a small magnet, which holds my car key. Within minutes I’m scooting out of Cardiff, unseen and unpursued.

  I want to make the most of it, this freedom. I want to touch the pedal to the metal and see if it’s really true that the car can do 135 miles per hour.

  I bet it can, but I play safe. Miss Grey and DC Griffiths both have reasons to keep a low profile, so we skim along the motorway doing not a whisper over eighty – or almost not a whisper – and enjoy the sound of the exhaust and the trees racing away behind us.

  We play for a while, then turn serious. Buy a mobile broadband dongle from an electronics store and zoom up to Blaengwynfi, to Hayley Morgan’s little cottage.

  We break in. It’s easily done: the police files noted a broken lock on the rear door. The door was secured by a combination lock and the case records have given me the combination.

  The house is empty and cold. Nothing much has changed. The window I broke has been reglazed. In the middle of the living room floor, there are some evidence boxes containing items removed from the property and now returned. The boxes make the place look more empty, not less.

  Morgan died intestate and with no
surviving relatives. The house is therefore being swallowed by the Crown.

  Bona vacantia: ownerless goods. A medieval doctrine permitting seizure.

  I set up in the kitchen. The little stone-flagged kitchen, where Morgan’s corpse feels present even now. So present, indeed, that I keep turning to check if it’s there. Plug in my dongle. I’ve taken care to ensure that my broadband service provider is one that gets signal up here. The speed isn’t brilliant, but it’s OK.

  Start work.

  When I’m thirsty, I drink water from the tap, skirting the place where Hayley once lay. I don’t eat, though, not inside the house. Not with Hayley’s toothmarks still etched into the plaster. Coal ash and plaster dust.

  That first day, I work for six hours. Don’t accomplish anything of shattering usefulness, but you don’t always know what’s useful at the time you do it.

  The following Sunday, I work for eight hours. Bring tulips too. Flowers for Hayley. My little gift.

  The Sunday after that, I glimpse Henderson’s BMW as I’m walking down the North Road, then a little later the blue Astra. That’s good. Very good. If they want to know what Fiona Grey is up to, I’m happy to show them. She does a lot of window shopping. Wedding dress shops, in particular, hold her gaze, but she’s got catholic tastes. She also loves the displays in upmarket patisseries, studies menus, loves looking at the kind of shoes no office cleaner could ever afford. She never buys much, though. Cheap sandwiches in see-through packets or a burger sold from a van. A cup of tea, sipped dry over forty-five minutes, bought in a city centre coffee shop that makes the Sunday newspapers available for free. At twelve thirty, a fit of extravagance takes her to a half-price movie matinee. A black and white weepie. Barbara Stanwyck sacrificing everything for a daughter who, in my opinion, could use a good slap. After that, we drift around a little more. Spend half an hour in Waterstones. Buy a self-help book which Fiona Grey chooses but which, it suddenly occurs to me as we count our money together at the till, will be of great interest to me too. Then we sit in the park, wishing we had food for the birds. When we see a man throw a sandwich in the bin, we leave it a respectable length of time, then fish it out and use that.