The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

  I nod.

  He tells me to step outside. Onto the street. Indicates the spot where I’m to stand, so he can keep me in view as he talks.

  I go and stand there. Smoke.

  I can see him, through the window, talking. To whom, to whom? That’s the whole riddle right there. Tinker’s dirty little secret. But we can’t decrypt the phone. Can’t always say for certain which handset he’s using. Didn’t have enough notice to get the pub wired for sound. If we knew who he was speaking to, we could probably close the case in twenty-four hours. But we don’t. And we can’t.

  Henderson stares out at me through the window. There’s a window box just outside, planted up with lobelia, I think, and something pink. He knows I’ve seen him, but holds his gaze. I have the strong sense that the person on the other end of the line is asking about me. Whether I’m to be trusted.

  Trusted or killed: that’s the choice.

  Kureishi: killed.

  Tania Lewis: killed.

  Anna Quintrell: trusted when she shouldn’t have been. I bet her arrest sent memos flying around the Tinker network. Next time, kill the bitch.

  I smoke my cigarette and let Henderson appraise me through the lobelia.

  Eventually, he beckons me inside. I go back to his table. Wait till he invites me to sit. Then sit.

  ‘Fiona, you want to work for us, right?’

  ‘I want you to pay me what you said.’

  ‘Payment in exchange for work, correct?’

  I shrug.

  ‘I’ve checked with my colleagues and we want to honour our agreement. Honour it, that is, if you agree to honour yours.’

  I shrug again. I’ve done everything they’ve asked.

  ‘And if we are to go on working with you, we’ll need you to be more reliable. No more running off to London. No more tracking down colleagues and sitting on their doorsteps. No attacking me in the middle of a drinks reception. We’ll need you to do nothing that you haven’t cleared with me first. Do you understand?’

  That’s his don’t-make-me-cross-or-I-might-have-to-murder-you voice.

  I say, ‘Yes.’

  Again that appraising look. Trust her or kill her? The only choices on this particular menu. I don’t usually hold his gaze, but this time I do. Sit there and let him scrutinise me. He has two colours of blue in his eye. Something sombre, the colour of deep sea or rain clouds. And flecks of something much brighter. Lobelia. Cobalt blue. Something tropical.

  A waiter comes to clear the table and I look away.

  Henderson has finished his meal. I’ve eaten half a fishcake and all of my chips. I don’t want to see the colours he has in his eyes. Don’t want to imagine the taste of his lips on mine.

  When the waiter goes, Henderson says softly, ‘OK. Good. You need to mean that “Yes”. Now, we will pay you what we said. We’ll even speed up the payment schedule. Help you get to New Zealand. But the work we’ll need from you will be a little different.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘There’ll be some training involved, but nothing you can’t handle.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And a few other changes too.’

  He starts to tell me what he means, but I’m pretty sure I know what he has in mind. Was pretty sure that I was ready for it.

  Only self-knowledge is an unreliable thing. You expect one thing, then – boom! – your body delivers something quite else. As I listen to Henderson’s calmly decisive explanation of the next steps in Fiona Grey’s unfolding criminal career, I find that she – she and I, the two of us together – is as frightened now as we were that time he hooded us up for the journey back into Cardiff. This time, though, the journey is darker and will last for longer.

  44

  Five in the morning. Fitzalan Place. Dawn proper doesn’t come for more than an hour, and my co-workers are once again dark shapes huddled by pale glass.

  Fiona Grey isn’t here, however.

  In her place: Jessica Taylor. I don’t know who she is, this Jessica, though I have her papers in my pocket, a bank account in her name. Jessica tells Euan Tanner, Fiona’s old boss, that Fiona had to leave town, that she mentioned that there might be a job available. I say – Jessica says – ‘I’ve cleaned before. Loads of times. We can make this a trial day if you want. I’m a grafter.’

  Tanner, peering at me in the darkness, agrees to a one-week trial, ‘which we’ll have to put down as a work experience thing. Just the first week. Then take it from there.’ My old battle-buddy, Allergy Lowri, is present but, to my relief, Tanner partners me up with someone else. Stella. Lowri coughs and complains as we’re being issued with cleaning stuff, but she doesn’t take a second look at me.

  To be fair, before finally agreeing to the swap, Tanner had the decency to try reaching Fiona, but without joy. It’s not surprising: Henderson took her phone. Pocketed the SIM card, ditched the rest.

  Most of Fiona’s clothes have gone too. Ditto her friends: Abs, Gary and Clementina, Jason the nice bus driver.

  Also gone: her room at the hostel, her Anger and Anxiety sessions with the much-bebangled Melinda, her visits to the library, her walks in the park.

  That’s not all Fiona Grey has lost. She’s lost her looks, literally. When Fiona and I stare into a mirror now, we see somebody else altogether. Jessica is blonde. Short hair, pixie-cut, feathery and upbeat. Bright red lips. More eye make-up than I ever use. Jewellery.

  Jessica has taken over my wardrobe too. Out go Fiona Grey’s cost-conscious purchases from eBay and Matalan. Out go her greys and her blacks and her unobtrusive neutrals. In comes – I don’t know. Jessica’s stuff. Skirts shorter than I’d wear. Leggings. Tops tighter and tartier than I’d ever choose. It’s not that Jessica doesn’t look perfectly OK in those outfits. Nor that women of her age don’t have every right to wear what they want. But still. When Fiona Grey and I look in a mirror, we see the glass occupied by some third party, whom neither of us know or would ever naturally be close too.

  The three of us nevertheless brush our teeth in sync. Wash our faces together. When we clean corporate washrooms, Fiona and I scrub mirrors, wipe them clean, then move on to the soap dispensers, taps and sinks and countertops. In theory, Mirror Jessica does the same. The same action, even the same pace of movement. But Fiona and I find it hard to believe in her effort, that she really works to get things clean. There’s something smirking in the way she mimics us, a cool girl laughing at the dorky ones.

  The simple fact is that we resent her presence, Fiona and I. Resent her blonde, extrovert brightness. The way she is always staring at us. The way she barges into our job, our washrooms, our lives.

  But I shouldn’t grumble. There are gains too.

  One such gain, small but significant, is an ankle bracelet. The sort they use to tag offenders. Jessica’s bracelet is fastened on the right leg. It’s immovable. I can’t get under it even to wash. Henderson, who put it there, told me, ‘It’s a precaution. The bracelet combines a very sensitive audio recorder with a basic tracking device. It means that we know where you are at all times. Also that we know who speaks to you and what they say.’

  Jessica, I think, doesn’t mind the bracelet too much. There used to be something of a Cardiff ASBO culture in which such things were worn as a mark of pride. A badge of social distinction. While I dislike the thing intensely, Jessica is half keen to flaunt it. Wants to sit outside, at pavement cafés in the city centre, wearing bare legs and heels, letting people see the thick-strapped bracelet, like a too-chunky watch without a face, watching their expressions as they slowly figure it out.

  I don’t quite let her do that. I mostly let her have her way with clothes – a leopard-print top, a push-up bra, a pair of wet-look leggings – but I generally insist on slouch boots, loose but concealing around the ankle. My body, my rules.

  Of course there are times when Jessica rebels. Does what she wants, dresses as she chooses. Other times when I assert control. Make her dress down. Even force her into a bookshop now and again. The
Waterstones on the Hayes. The little bookshop on Wellfield Road, where I search for cheap editions of the classics and Jessica flips through anything with pictures.

  We get along. Not friends, but ill-assorted housemates carefully negotiating our shared social space.

  I say to Henderson, ‘If the police take me in, they’ll find the bracelet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It won’t take them long to realise I’m Fiona Grey.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They have my DNA. And my fingerprints. And . . .’

  Henderson says, tautly, ‘The bracelet is for our protection, not yours. If they take you into a police station, we’ll know that they’ve done so. If they talk to you, and don’t wipe the recording, we’ll hear what they’ve been saying. If they talk to you and do wipe the recording, we’ll know that they’ve done so. That’s what we’ll check for. Every day. Is there twenty-four hours of material there? Does any of it suggest a police approach?’

  I don’t say anything, but Jessica and my two Fionas share a common view of this approach to our welfare and I expect my face expresses that view.

  Henderson says, ‘Fiona, if the police approach you, we have a problem. We do. You do. Your job will be to say absolutely nothing and we’ll work, as we did before, through a lawyer. There’s nothing illegal about changing your look. Nothing illegal about wearing an ankle bracelet, if it comes to that. Stick with us and we’ll stick with you.’

  I shrug. At this point, in any event, I have no choice at all.

  And there are other gains, besides.

  Henderson has put me into a one-bedroom flat down on the Bay. It’s bland and boxy. Street view not sea-view. First floor not penthouse. But still. It is, by most standards, the smartest accommodation I’ve had all year. Fiona and I don’t really like it, but we recognise that Henderson meant well. He was even nice enough to tell the truth. ‘We’ve got audio and video feeds from the apartment. Audio only in the bathroom, so if you prefer to get changed there, you should feel free.’

  I say thank you, but my thanks are not effusive.

  The kitchen has nothing in it except an unopened box of cheap crockery from Argos. A box of cutlery. Some glasses. And a salt carton. ‘Everyone needs salt,’ says Henderson.

  Nor is it just my accommodation that gets an upgrade. My education does too.

  Henderson takes me to spend a long day with Ian Shoesmith in London, learning how to hack computers: a new skill, another gain.

  What’s remarkable, really, is how simple it is. You think these things must be complicated, but they’re not, they’re really not. My first step – Jessica’s first step – will be to obtain the necessary passwords. So we simply place a keystroke recorder on the back of the relevant computers, something so easy I did it once myself on another case altogether, and wait for those recorders to collect the user’s passwords. Then, the next day or the next week, depending on my cleaning schedule, I use those passwords to place a little bit of software on the relevant computer. The software is, I think, just a classier version of the Trojan horse software that Kureishi once used. You can buy commercial versions of the same thing easily enough, the only real difference being that the commercial versions let you know they’re there.

  Indeed, although my training day was long – ten hours all told, plus a good six hours of travel – the essence was simple: steal some passwords, load some software. The whole thing only took as long as it did because Shoesmith made me practise on a whole variety of computers, configured with multiple different operating systems, firewalls, and security set-ups. By the time we’d finished, I was as quick and as certain as Shoesmith himself. That’s not a boast, or not really. The process just isn’t that hard.

  At the end of the day, I asked Shoesmith if I could have a copy of the software. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Just because,’ and he said, ‘OK.’ So I set up a Hotmail account under a false name and emailed myself a copy of the software. I don’t really know why I wanted it, even. It’s just the sort of thing I prefer to have.

  Another gain.

  These gains and losses are bewildering at some level, but the Fiona Griffiths me understands it all. Predicted it all, indeed.

  Simply put: Tinker needs me, three times over. First, because I’m still the only payroll clerk they have. The only person who knows how a payroll department actually operates. Secondly, they’ve lost Quintrell. Her precise accountancy view of payroll isn’t quite the perspective I bring, but they still need someone who can look at a payslip and tell them if the National Insurance has been calculated correctly. And then, third, there’s my role as cleaner. The role I now share with Jessica. My ability to get into corporate premises. To get up close and personal with the computers that matter.

  But I’m not an easy hire. Uppermost in Henderson’s mind is the fact that Fiona Grey is now known to the police and dancing round a fraud charge, at that.

  And that’s their dilemma. Tinker wants Fiona Grey’s expertise and access, but they’re worried by the risk of contamination. I’m simultaneously essential and potentially lethal.

  The solution that Henderson and his buddies came up with was to create a new girl in the mould of the old one. Hence Jessica Taylor’s arrival: a clean identity, a woman without a past. Hence also the need for the costume, hair and makeup changes. Henderson coaches me to speak differently, walk differently, act differently. He wants Jessica’s new ‘clean’ identity to belong to someone who isn’t even recognisable as the old Fiona Grey. Her polar opposite.

  And I think she is. I mean, yes, Buzz would recognise me if ‘Jessica’ spent time with him, but I’m sure that if I passed him on the street, he’d never notice me in her. Lowri, who I still bump into now and again, is a self-absorbed cow admittedly, the only real hold-over from my old life, but she’s not shown the slightest surprise or curiosity when she sees me. Just tells me about her allergies with the same wearisome from-the-top approach she adopted the first time she met Fiona Grey. I try to make Jessica louder, brassier, less pliable with Lowri than I do elsewhere – I try to make her character consistent with her clothes, her look, her make-up – but I genuinely wonder if I need to make the effort. To Lowri, I’m just another girl.

  Henderson is right, of course. Given his role and his objectives, he’s doing everything right. The way I’d do it, if I were him.

  But while I understand all this – and had assumed myself ready to accept the new conditions of this undercover life – I find myself taken aback by the reality. I’d found it easy enough to become Fiona Grey. More than that: I enjoyed the change, found it simpler.

  But this Jessica Taylor: I don’t relate to her. Not to her looks, her confidence, her outward brightness. If my head was less muddled, I’d handle these things better. I’d be brassy, mouthy Jessica when I had to be – with Lowri and the other cleaning girls, or when out in town – and myself the rest of the time. Henderson only cares about the public performance. He doesn’t care who I am in private.

  But I’m not that fixed, that centred. When my air bubble floats into Jessica’s world, I end up becoming her, because I’m not sure who else or how else to be. I bounce between my different identities, trying not to say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and all the time feeling my head degrading. A pellet of uranium 235, spitting alpha particles. Teetering on the brink of collapse or ignition.

  It’s at home when these things are at their worst. When I’m getting ready for bed, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I sometimes don’t know who I am. I try to remember my name, my real one. Try to remember anything: about Buzz, Jackson, Brattenbury, my family.

  I usually get there, sort of. An accumulation of scraps: some names, a few images, a memory of past kindness. But nothing that really joins up. Nothing that lies in a straight line between actual people and me. And whenever I almost get something, the blonde girl in the mirror shakes her head at me and the surface of the pond breaks again and I end up with nothing but confusion and a pocket full of scr
aps.

  And sometimes I get really, properly lost. End up sitting on the bathroom floor to avoid the girl in the mirror. Sometimes go to sleep there, or think I do.

  Once, when I think I was very lost, Henderson phoned me. I was lying on the bathroom floor and had been there I don’t know how long.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Do you want me to come over?’

  ‘No.’

  There’s a pause. I have the hallucination that Hayley Morgan is in the bathroom with me. I know she’s dead and I think I might be too. I think I was probably asleep when Henderson rang, so this isn’t quite like a full-blown psychosis. More like one of those things where it takes time to recover fully into wakefulness.

  ‘You’ve been in the bathroom two hours.’

  ‘It’s the only place you don’t spy on me.’

  He says something about the need to protect Jessica from police intervention. How my interests are protected by all this.

  I don’t know what that means. My hips are hurting from lying too long on a tiled floor.

  ‘Can you take the camera out of the bedroom?’

  ‘OK. I’ll do that tomorrow.’ There’s a pause on the line. A softly crackling emptiness. ‘No, cancel that. I’ll come over now.’

  I don’t know what I say to that, if anything, but the line goes dead. I sit on the bathroom floor and count my breaths. In-two-three-four-five. Out-two-three-four-five.

  Some time later, it doesn’t seem that long, Henderson arrives. He opens the bathroom door, appraises me a moment.

  Disappears. Comes back in a few minutes. Has a little piece of electronics in his hand.

  ‘This is the video camera from the bedroom.’ He drops it by the sink. It’s tiny: these things come very small these days.

  I think he expects me to stand up, but I don’t. He slides down beside me. Takes my hand.