The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

by Harry Bingham

  I push a window open, though crime-scene procedure would have me touch nothing.

  Morgan is terribly thin. There’s a sharpness about the way her bones poke from her skin that’s somehow agonizing. Like an African famine repainted in Welsh colors.

  Some sign of a head injury. Nothing much. I guess she fell, hurt herself, and never got up again.

  I start to explore the kitchen.

  Look inside the fridge, swing the cupboards open, look in every drawer. The kitchen sink doesn’t have cupboards beneath it, just a red gingham curtain on a piece of clothes line.

  Cutlery, crockery, pots and pans.

  Cling film, sandwich bags, old boiler manuals, oven racks.

  Kitchen cleaner, rat poison, dustpan and brush.

  But no food. None. Not anywhere.

  Not a spillage of breakfast cereal. No tin of fish, no box of cat food, no place where some dried fruit has spilled and never been cleared up. In the dustbin, I find a packet of sugar that has been torn open. Usually with sugar, when you shake an empty packet, it rustles with the glassy tinkle of sugar crystals caught in the folds at the bottom. When you think about it, in fact, it’s rare for any packaging to be completely empty. There’s always a little ketchup left in the bottle, a little sauce left in the can.

  Not here. The sugar packet looks as if it’s been sucked or licked clean. The paper’s smooth texture has become fibrous and uneven. Something similar is true of any other food waste I can find.

  I shake the packet of rat poison.

  It doesn’t rattle. It’s completely empty.

  I leave the house, putting the front door on the latch, and drive down the hill until I get a signal. Call Dunwoody.

  ‘Keeping out of trouble, are you?’ he asks.

  I don’t know what the answer to that is. I’m standing by my car, just below the cattle grid, watching a buzzard test its weight on the winds blowing up from Aberkenfig. Its armaments seem tactless somehow. Excessive.

  The bird hovers overhead as Dunwoody repeats his question.

  I still don’t know how to answer, so I just say ‘Yes.’

  3.

  The next thirty minutes are spent with the logistics of death. Get a duty officer up from Neath, the divisional surgeon from Cardiff, a SOCO – scene of the crime officer – up from Swansea. It’s Dunwoody’s job to do those things really, but I find myself doing most of it. I keep him in the loop, more or less. He promises to come over ‘soon as I can’. I ask him to get a full set of phone records from the phone provider. Also bank records. Also any medical and social services records. I’d do it myself except those things are easier to do from the office.

  I also speak to Jon Breakell, who says T.M. Baron has been traced to an address in Leicester.

  ‘And you’re going to tell me that Dunwoody has got some uniforms kicking down the doors.’

  ‘Not exactly, but this kind of changes things, I guess.’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  I hang up.

  I’m parked just below the cattle grid, but within sight of the open moorland. From where I am, I can count six sheep, but there will be dozens more, roaming the hill, cropping the grass, disturbing the grouse and the pipits, the skylarks and the plovers. There are enough sheep on this hill to feed a family for years. Hayley Morgan died as next season’s roast dinner grazed the verge beyond her kitchen window.

  There’s only one road up to the cottage and when a clean blue Passat noses its way up the road, I travel with it. The Passat discharges one SOCO, Gavin Jones, and a plump Detective Sergeant, who turns out to be Bob Shelton, the duty officer from Neath. Jones has a porn star moustache, sprinkled with grey.

  I say, ‘You’re it? This is the team?’

  Jones the SOCO, who clearly knows his colleague socially not just professionally, says, ‘Yes, love, this isn’t CSI.’

  I’m thrilled to be called ‘love’ by anyone with a porn star moustache, but can’t help pointing out that the woman inside died via a combination of starvation and poisoning. That we believe her to have been the unwitting accomplice of a complex fraud. And that, actually, crime scene investigation is precisely what this is.

  The two men roll their eyes at each other over my head. I’m too prettily feminine to be offended. Just say, ‘She’s in the kitchen. You can view her from that window.’

  Jones looks through the window. Clocks the sight, the smell. And, when it comes to the point, seems reasonably professional. Suits up properly. Gloves and mask. Steps into the house. Doesn’t go in far, just enough to view the corpse.

  I ask him if he has a spare suit in his car. He does. It’s ridiculously large – a man’s size, XL – but I put it on anyway. By the time I’m ready to re-enter the house, the fat DS is sitting on the garden wall about to light up.

  I say, ‘If you’re going to have a cigarette, you are not having it there. You haven’t secured the back of the house. You haven’t checked the garage and parking area. Given that any third party would have arrived by car, those areas form part of the crime scene. DI Dunwoody is on his way over here now and he will expect me to report to him when he gets here.’

  I tie off my charm-package with a neat little smile and head on into the house. Jones hasn’t moved far. The little front hall commands the living room on the left, the kitchen on the right. He’s checking both rooms with a high power ALS lamp, swapping filters to check for biological traces.

  ‘No blood that I can see. Plenty of fingerprints, of course. No drugs showing up. Let’s try bright white.’

  He removes the filter and swipes the torch around the floors. The cottage isn’t the cleanest, and the living room has an open fire which looks like it provided the only heating for that part of the house. Under the torch’s glare, every footprint shows up precisely in the dust. The scatter of glass crystals gleams like diamonds.

  ‘That’s you?’ says Jones, pointing at the footprints which lead from the living room window to the kitchen.

  ‘Yes.’

  There are other prints, but small ones, belonging either to a woman or a child. Hayley Morgan, whom we haven’t yet approached, was no bigger than me. Jones assesses the dead woman’s feet from a distance and looks at the pattern of marks on the living room floor.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ he says, meaning male footprints.

  ‘Me neither.’

  We both assume any fraudster is a man, though we have no particular reason to think so.

  In the corner by the TV, there’s a bundle of papers, down with the firelighters and matches. Most of the paper looks like it’s there to start a fire with, but there are a couple of soft cardboard document wallets.

  ‘I’d like those, when you can.’

  Jones nods and asks me to pass him his camera. He photographs the scene, wide-angle and close up. Photographs the floor. Moves over to the document wallets. Checks them, close up, for biological traces, and nods to indicate that they’re clear, as far as he can see.

  He gives them to me.

  As all that is happening, I’m looking into the kitchen. The smell is still intense, though there’s air moving through the house now and I’m standing in the hall by an open door. The more light and air there is in this house, the smaller Morgan seems. A minor detail. A styling accessory.

  I take the document wallets, but say, ‘What’s that?’

  The kitchen has a rough, textured plaster. On the wall above an electric night storage heater, someone has scratched away at the plaster, wearing a hole right through to the old-fashioned breeze blocks beneath. There are grooves left in the soft plaster. Jones focuses his torch beam on the area. It’s hard to be sure, but the grooves look like tooth marks.

  Jones doesn’t say anything direct, just, ‘We’ll know when we examine her mouth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Those things.’ He nods at the exposed block wall. ‘They’re made of compacted coal ash. Waste materials from a blast furnace. God knows what kind of chemicals in there.’


  ‘Yes.’

  He shines the lamp on Morgan’s face. Her personality somehow shrinks away under the illumination. Simplifying, reducing. There is dust on her face. The dust might be a combination of plaster and coal ash or it might not. He moves his lamp away and there is something reverential in the way he does it.

  I have my documents. He has his camera.

  ‘I’ll get on then,’ he says.

  I don’t know how to answer that either, so I just say ‘Yes.’

  4.

  Later that evening. We’re in an evil little pub near Blaengwynfi. A red carpet, darkly patterned to compete with the beer stains and the ground-in food. Stone benches beneath the windows and a smell of damp. There are four drinkers here apart from us, all men. They attack their pints the way infantrymen march: slowly, knowing that the road ahead is long.

  I’m here with Dunwoody, Jon Breakell and Buzz. Buzz – Detective Sergeant David Brydon, as far as my colleagues are concerned – isn’t on the inquiry team, but when he was done for the day he cadged a lift out here with a scientific officer from Cathays. He’ll drive back into town with me later.

  Brydon and I are a fairly public couple now, treated by a unit as our colleagues. We’re careful to be properly professional while at the office, but out here, at the end of the day, in a time which might be an after-hours social or might, if Dunwoody is feeling generous, count as formal overtime, those rules are more relaxed. Buzz and I sit side by side on one of the stone benches. He had his arm around me earlier, as a way of showing that he was relaxed. He’s removed it now, but I can still feel its phantom weight across my shoulders, the warmth of him down my side.

  The table is littered. Bank statements. Phone bills. Water bills. Electricity. Correspondence. Everyone leaves the paperwork to me. Fi Griffiths, the paperwork kid. I don’t mind, except when Dunwoody puts his beer down on one of the phone bills, creating a ring mark.

  ‘That’s Exhibit A under your beer glass,’ I say.

  He moves the paper, not the beer.

  With Hayley Morgan, it’s the same deal as it was with Adele Gibson. For eighteen months she received money from the superstore, but that money vanished again, almost immediately, to an account operated by T.M. Baron. For most of that period, the rest of Morgan’s finances were untouched. She had a tiny income, tiny expenses, but she got by. Lived as she chose. Then twelve weeks ago, her account was drained. Every penny that came in was instantly taken. At the end of every day, her account registered a balance of £0.00.

  Before long, her phone was cut off. Then her electricity.

  I think of Morgan licking the sugar out of an empty packet, in a house gone dark. Think of her looking at the packet of rat poison and thinking, ‘How much longer?’ Wondering how long it was before she put her head to the wall for the first time wanting to see if plaster dust and breeze block could fill her belly.

  ‘I don’t understand it, really, not in these small places,’ says Dunwoody. ‘Why wouldn’t she just walk down the hill and ask for food? Or call the police and report a fraud? Or anything.’

  Buzz says, ‘Yes, but loads of people die where you could ask the same thing. Last winter, how many thousand pensioners was it died from the cold? All they had to do was phone the gas company or speak to a neighbor, but instead they let themselves freeze. Every year, thousands of people.’

  ‘That’s true, but still. Why let yourself starve?’

  There are a few answers to that, or none. We now know – from medical records and the documents I recovered from the cottage – that Morgan suffered a minor stroke some eight months back. She was assessed as having minor cognitive impairment, but perhaps those assessments were wrong. They sometimes are. She’d had mental-health problems too – depression, mostly – and those things might have returned. And her nearest neighbors weren’t of her kind or class. And, with the death of coal-mining in these areas, none of these communities are what they used to be. And perhaps Morgan had some strange old-fashioned pride around begging. Or thought she’d sort things out with the bank. Or suffered some further stroke. Or had some petty feud with the people in the shop or the health center. Or some combination of all these things and more.

  We never finally know the truth, never learn the full map of any crime. Motivations and choices recede endlessly from view.

  I don’t say this though. Just read the paperwork as the others chat. Dunwoody looks at his empty beer glass and says, ‘I’d swear I got the first round in.’

  Buzz gets up to get more drinks. Breakell can’t drink – he’s driving – and I don’t.

  I hold up one of the documents. A letter from social services. ‘She used to get fortnightly care visits. Someone cancelled them.’

  ‘Who? Morgan?’

  ‘Well, according to this, yes,’ I say, ‘but this letter is dated June of this year.’

  Dunwoody shrugs. His face is pink and the beer has already risen to his eyes. He has a close-trimmed beard, which his mother probably thinks is strawberry-blond. To everyone else, it’s ginger.

  ‘Maybe Hayley Morgan wrote that letter, cancelling those visits, or maybe she didn’t. Her account was emptied about four days after this letter was sent. Stayed empty, every day after that.’

  Buzz comes back with the beers. Dunwoody takes his, but his eyes are on me.

  I say, ‘Hayley Morgan died because she was starving. And she was starving because she was robbed. If someone deliberately prevented care visits, in an effort to perpetuate their fraud, you could argue that that individual recklessly endangered Hayley Morgan’s life. That’s not payroll fraud. That’s manslaughter.’

  Dunwoody takes the letter from me, but the letter is not the point. You need three ingredients to make up a constructive manslaughter. First, an unlawful act. Second, an act likely to cause harm to the person affected. Third, death, though neither foreseen nor intended, results. As far as I can see it, we have a big yes on points one and three and a slightly more doubtful yes to point two. The case law is mostly built on the assumption that the harm-causing act is directly physical in nature. Punching someone in the face in one notable case, or pulling a replica gun on someone with a weak heart in another.

  Stealing money and cancelling visits from social workers. Could those things add up to manslaughter? I think they could.

  I think they did.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Dunwoody, ‘I’m not sure.’ But he hasn’t touched his beer and his eyes have lost some of their pinkishness. There’s anxiety there too, a rapid lateral movement of the pupils.

  Which is good. If Hayley Morgan’s death was no more than a nasty accident, Dunwoody has already investigated as rigorously as anyone would expect. If we’re looking at a crime which stands only one rung down from murder, he’s been sloppy. Slow to get to the scene. Insufficient in his demand for resources. Lazy in supervision.

  He pulls out his phone. No signal.

  ‘Sod it.’

  He walks out into the car park. Buzz looks at me. This isn’t his case. He’s part amused by the scene he’s just witnessed, part keen to have the last part explained.

  ‘If I were him, I’d be calling my colleagues in Leicester. He should have been on their case from the start.’

  Buzz rubs my back and I half close my eyes as I give myself over to the rub. Jon Breakell, feeling like a spare part probably, goes to have a pee.

  ‘We should go on holiday,’ Buzz says. ‘You and me. Somewhere nice.’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘Get some sun.’

  I nod.

  ‘You’ve got leave, have you?’

  I stare at him. I almost never take leave. I do it only when I have to, and then never know what to do with it. That’s changed a bit since I’ve been going out with Buzz. He books holidays, makes all the arrangements, tells me what to pay him for my share. I’ve no idea how many days’ holiday I have owing. He knows that, I’m sure.

  Buzz lets me hang a moment, then grins. ‘You’ve got twenty-th
ree days, including fifteen carried over from last year, and you need to use those or you’ll lose ‘em.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I thought maybe Greece? Or Turkey? Somewhere still hot enough for beaches and swimming.’

  I nod. ‘That sounds …’ I’m not sure what I’m meant to say next, so just nod some more, then tuck my head against his shoulder as Jon Breakell returns.

  ‘I’ll make the arrangements.’

  A little wriggle of emotion escapes from somewhere behind my sternum. An elusive quicksilver flash that I can’t identify and that’s out of sight before I can pin it out for examination.

  I say, ‘Don’t forget my course.’

  I’ve got a training course coming up. A four-week residential thing in London. Buzz says, ‘I won’t. We’ll go after that.’

  His voice twists a bit as he speaks. He doesn’t like me going on the course, but doesn’t want to rehash that argument now.

  Under the table, I knead his thigh.

  Then the front door bangs open and Dunwoody enters. A blue twilight briefly framed behind him. Brown hills and white moths, papery in the lamplight.

  ‘Leicestershire police have visited the address.’ His voice is throaty. ‘A family of eight. A Mr. and Mrs. Desai, his mother and five children. The husband is a hospital porter. Wife is a stay-at-home mum. Oldest child just turned fourteen. No computer present on the property. Two phones, both seized.’

  He stops. His face is still in motion, though. He’s feeling something, though I’m not sure what or how to describe it. The pressure of great things, perhaps. The responsibility and the fear.

  I stretch my legs out. Pushing my toes out and down, feeling the burn in my calves and thighs. Feeling present. Happy.

  ‘Payroll fraud,’ I say. ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’

  5.

  A beautiful thing, but strange.

  Krishna Desai, the hospital porter, is not our T.M. Baron. Jon and I drove out to interview him under caution. He was helpful and friendly, though not all that comfortable speaking English. He disclaimed all knowledge of a T.M. Baron, said he didn’t use a computer, but his children were taught about them at school. At the end of the interview, we asked him to fill out a short feedback form on a police website and he filled out his name slowly. He wasn’t all that familiar with the keyboard and didn’t know how to use a mouse. When it came to entering data other than his name, he looked at us, eyes asking what he was meant to do next.