If it comes to that, I’ll be able to access any information that a superintendent can command. Which is a lot.
It’s a nice feeling.
I won’t rush into anything. I need to get my own head straightened out before I plunge into all that again. But that sense of gathering excitement which came to me that day in Hayley Morgan’s cottage is here again with me now. Here, amongst these neatly hoovered floors, these tidily dusted surfaces.
Fiona Grey came to be a pretty damn good cleaner, I reflect, but her partner, Miss Griffiths, is a pretty useful investigator. Somewhere down that Gareth Glynian road lies a clue which will take me closer to my biggest and most urgent mystery. The mystery of me.
A different taxi takes me home.
Magnolia paint. Stainless steel kitchen. A garden that is a blank strip of nothing. A living room without decoration.
My house. My home. Even Fiona Grey had more care for her interiors than this.
I walk around my living room and kitchen. Feeling things. Opening doors and closing them. Feeling the presence of what used to be my life. A castaway on the shores of normal.
I don’t feel sleepy, though it’s now very late. But I act as though I am. Brush my teeth. Take off my clothes. Look at the dressings still oozing blood on my feet. Put on a nightie, a scoop-necked thing with a blue bow and a pattern of tiny blue flowers. Like bilberry flowers, I think. Tiny bells.
I’m intensely aware of the lack of surveillance. No video, no audio. I walk past power sockets in my underwear weirded out by the realisation that no one is watching.
And I realise that Fiona Grey is not dead. An undercover identity is never ended. It survives the operation, ready to be used again. I don’t need her now and she doesn’t need me, but if life gets challenging for me, Fiona Griffiths, I can always walk into the hostel again. Play table football with Clementina, stand outside and smoke ciggies with Gary.
I think too of the wedding dress I almost bought. Glossy stripes and a nipped-in waist. I wanted to be that person. The one who could have worn that wedding dress with authenticity. With a sense of belonging. I wanted that more than almost anything.
I hope Buzz finds happiness.
I hope I do too.
I make a cup of peppermint tea, plump up my pillows, and turn out the light.
Afterword
This book is a fiction, of course, but one which rests on some firmly factual footings.
The life of the undercover police officer is often as remarkable – and as dangerous – as I’ve portrayed it. It’s true, for example, that the national undercover training course is the hardest offered by the police service. True too that the vast majority of applicants fail. Also true that undercover officers receive no huge overtime payments, no vast bonuses to make up for the fact that their old life disappears, that their family ties are severed, almost completely. It’s also not my invention that a legend is for ever: the bad guys don’t go away just because you happen to have completed an assignment. The fear lives on.
As for the technology in this book – all that audio and video bugging, the transmitters and the RF scanners – they’re all real too, and not just real, but very cheap. If you want to buy a voice-activated bugging device that looks like (and is) an ordinary power socket, it’ll set you back about fifty quid. Pens that record, little magnetic gizmos that track cars, RF scanners that find them – you’ll find all these things sold by the bigger online stores, and at prices that are scarily affordable. In this new dawn of surveillance, no one ever knows if they’re safe.
Furthermore, many of the incidents in the book were informed by my conversations with former undercover officers or those that managed them. When, for example, Brattenbury decides to ‘arrest’ Fiona as a way of removing her from the enquiry, he was simply doing what countless other police officers have done in real life. When Anna Quintrell makes a long and detailed confession to her cellmate, her mistake is one that countless other criminals have made in the past. Even that final journey to the farmhouse: the way that Henderson eliminated aerial pursuit came straight from an account given to me by a recently serving police officer. If it seems ungenerous of me not to name those people who have helped me – well, they would prefer to remain in the shadows. My thanks to them anyway. This book owes them, big time.
Oh, and one last thing. The press has been rightly critical of certain recent undercover operations, which were poorly targeted and slackly managed. But those operations are not, I think, typical. Most undercover enquiries are aimed at infiltrating and breaking some deeply unpleasant organisations: criminal gangs who use intimidation and violence as a routine part of their trade. Those gangs need to be destroyed and their senior officers arrested and convicted. The burden of achieving that – and achieving that by lawful means – falls, to a disproportionate extent, on a small group of astonishingly brave officers whose exploits will never, and can never, gain public recognition. We all owe them, however. Our streets are safer because of their commitment and courage.
HB
We’ve attempted to track down the copyright holder for the dedication quote, but without luck. We invite that person to get in touch with us directly.
A Note on Cotard’s Syndrome
Cotard’s syndrome is a rare but perfectly genuine condition, and an exceptionally serious one besides. Its core ingredients are depression and psychosis, which together bring about an extreme form of depersonalisation. Or, to put the same thing in plainer language: sufferers believe themselves to be dead. Patients frequently report ‘seeing’ their flesh decompose and crawl with maggots. Early childhood trauma is implicated in pretty much every well-documented case of the syndrome. Full recovery is uncommon, death by suicide all too frequent.
Fiona Griffiths’s own state of mind is, of course, a fictional representation of a complex illness and I have not sought to achieve clinical precision. Nevertheless, the broad strokes of her condition would be familiar to anyone unfortunate enough to be acquainted with it.
About the Author
Harry Bingham is the author of Talking to the Dead and Love Story, With Murders, both featuring Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths. When he isn’t writing, he’s either walking the dogs or running The Writers’ Workshop, a leading editorial consultancy. He lives in Oxfordshire and is currently working on his next Fiona Griffiths novel.
Also by Harry Bingham
Fiona Griffiths novels
Talking to the Dead
Love Story, With Murders
Other novels
The Money Makers
Sweet Talking Money
The Sons of Adam
Glory Boys
The Lieutenant’s Lover
Non-Fiction
This Little Britain
Stuff Matters
Getting Published . . . and Staying Published
How To Write
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Orion Books
This ebook first published in 2014 by Orion Books
Copyright © Harry Bingham 2014
The right of Harry Bingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 4094 8
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths) Page 40
