The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

by Harry Bingham

  I say to Brattenbury, ‘You’ll have to take me to Manchester, of course?’

  ‘Yes.’

  To Jackson: ‘Is there any way you could arrange—’

  ‘Already done. Your young man will be in Manchester. We’ll give you as much time together as we can arrange. Make the most of it.’ His face shifts a little and he adds, ‘These long assignments. They get to anyone. It can take time to settle back into normal.’

  I realize that my apartment would have been under surveillance from the moment that Roy Williams was reported missing. Someone would have seen Henderson kiss his fingers and touch them to my lips. Seen that and reported it, but Jackson is too wise an owl to let the matter go any further.

  I also realize that from Jackson’s perspective and from Brattenbury’s this whole arrest process is a way to get me out from active undercover work. They couldn’t simply withdraw me: that would flag me up as a spy to Henderson and his buddies. A big, loud, public arrest is probably the single most common way of withdrawing an undercover officer from duty. From their point of view, Fiona Grey has just about reached the end of her useful life.

  I eat more cake, but I’m getting fidgety. I’m not sure that I want to stop being Fiona Grey.

  I say, ‘The cell I’m in. Can you make it as cold as possible? I want a rough night.’

  Rogers goes off to sort something out.

  I ask about Quintrell. How her interrogation has gone so far. Jackson pulls in Jane Alexander, who’s been leading the interviews. Jane is a friend, sort of, and she stares at my face, the obvious question on her lips.

  I tell her that I answered back to DCI Jackson. ‘Big mistake,’ I say.

  My mouth is stiff on the left, because the bruising reaches down to my cheek. When I smile, I smile with one side only.

  Alexander darts me a look that’s a mixture of things: polite smile, alarm, professionalism and something else. Respect, or something like it. She has an exaggerated view of my abilities and is perhaps a little scared by my oddity.

  But she collects herself. Summarizes things with swift brevity. Quintrell is so frightened of what Henderson might do to her that she’s revealed nothing. She’s heard the audio recordings made at her house. She knows she’s going to jail. Knows that the only way to reduce her sentence is to cooperate. But she has still said nothing, other than answer a few basic questions about name and identity.

  I say, ‘Keep going. Make it long. Make it hard.’

  Alexander nods. She’ll do turn and turn about with a colleague, for most of the evening if necessary.

  I stand up, ready to be taken to my cell.

  Brattenbury stands too. ‘Good luck, Fiona. Anything you can get.’

  A custody officer comes to the door. No one has told the staff here that I’m a police officer, but when an interview room is stuffed with senior officers and chocolate cake, it’s fairly obvious that I’m not a regular criminal.

  The officer looks at my face. Under ordinary circumstances, he’d file a report. Cardiff isn’t the sort of place where suspects get beaten up in underground rooms. But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. Jackson says to leave it. I say so too. The officer tells Jackson he’ll need to report the matter to the custody sergeant – the right response – and escorts me to my cell.

  Two beds. Thin blue mattresses laid over concrete. Blankets. An all-in-one metal loo and washbasin, which sounds odd but looks practical. A concrete shelf which doubles as a table.

  There’s light, but no window. Home Office guidelines require that prisoners can tell the difference between night and day, so the Cardiff suite was built with solar tubes that extend as much as twenty meters down from the roof. A panel in the ceiling releases a weird, luminous glow. Cold air blows from some vent.

  The guard says, ‘All right,’ and closes the door. Steel door, painted blue.

  I’m all alone. Somewhere, invisibly, a microphone gathers the silence.

  37.

  Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

  She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutesy little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

  We stare at each other.

  She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

  She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

  I give her one.

  ‘And another?’

  I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

  ‘So am I.’

  I shrug. Not interested.

  There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

  ‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

  I shrug.

  Light dies in the ceiling.

  She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

  There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

  She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

  I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

  The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

  I sleep.

  38.

  Sleep and eventually wake.

  Light glows from the ceiling. A prison dawn.

  Quintrell doesn’t look like she’s slept much. She’s propped against the wall. Blanket doubled up over her legs. She’s staring at me. Her skin looks blue.

  I don’t have my watch – it was removed at processing – but Quintrell has hers. I ask her the time.

  ‘Coming up to five o’clock.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I rinse my mouth in the little metal basin. Drink a bit.

  My headache comes back and I want aspirin. Could ask for some, in fact – the custody staff would bring them – but I don’t want the intrusion.

  Sit back down on my bed, look at Quintrell.

  She says, ‘You should report them.’ She means the bruising on my face.

  ‘That’d work well.’

  Quintrell trusts my legend completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

  I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

  ‘Thanks.’

  She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

  ‘I like your dress.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Silence fills the cell.

  Silence, and that eerie light which seems unconnected to any sun.

  ‘Is this your first time? You know: in prison.’

  I say, ‘This isn’t prison. Prison’s worse.’ Then after a bit, I add, ‘There was stuff in Manchester. I’ve never been in for long.’

  ‘The policewoman yesterday told me that I could get ten years.’ She starts to cry again.

  I watch her with interest. Envy, actually. I’ve only cried once in my adult life. I want to ask her the secret. What interior handbrake has to be released.

  ‘There was one guy, Somebody Scragg, who got seventeen years. For fraud. They showed me the reports.’

  I say, ‘They showed them to me too. I don’t think we’ll get seventeen years.’

  More crying.

  Light str
engthens in the ceiling. Down the hall, we hear a prisoner – mentally ill, almost certainly – shout and bang in his cell. Down the corridor, a movement of men.

  ‘I’ve got a daughter, you know.’

  ‘Have you?’

  That’s news to me. No glimpse of it in Quintrell’s life so far. Nothing on the Tinker records. Brattenbury didn’t know it. Jackson didn’t. Jane Alexander didn’t know it when she was interviewing.

  ‘I was very young when I had her. Seventeen. When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t coping so well with things and gave her up for adoption. She’s eighteen now. We were just starting to get to know each other again.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Julia.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘She’s an art student. Lives in Bristol. We were beginning to do OK.’

  ‘She can visit you. It doesn’t have to end.’

  ‘She won’t visit.’

  I let time go by. We’ve got plenty of time. I was arrested just after eleven. Quintrell would have been taken about the same time. The law permits us to be held for twenty-four hours without charge, thirty-six hours with the authority of a superintendent – something that Jackson can easily obtain – and ninety-six hours if a magistrate agrees. A magistrate probably would agree, given the circumstances, but it would be easier just to charge us. For a serious offence, like ours, and with murder and abduction in the background, we’ll almost certainly be remanded into pre-trial custody.

  Fear, exhaustion and time: interrogation’s holy trinity.

  I say, ‘Anna, how did you get into all this? Why did you get started?’

  And she tells me.

  Almost without further prompting. Without thought for where she is or who could be listening. It’s a beautiful illustration of the interrogator’s oldest maxim: that people want to confess. An urge as deep as breathing. The beautiful relief of sharing secrets.

  As she tells it, Henderson approached her eighteen months ago with some queries about payroll. That must have been when Henderson discovered what Kureishi was up to. The point at which a little local fraud started to go big time.

  ‘I mean, I’m a trained accountant. I’m a professional. Vic’s just a thug. He knew nothing at all. Didn’t know the basics. He didn’t even understand the potential. It took me to explain it. I mean, really, that’s the silly thing. The whole thing was my idea. They just took it from me. They treated me … treated me like …’

  She isn’t able to finish that sentence, because what she means is ‘they treated me like you’. Quintrell still sees herself as officer class. I’m several rungs below that. Servant class. A skivvy. Her confessional impulse now is given extra urgency by her bitterness at Henderson’s treatment of her.

  I neither challenge nor support her. Just let her talk and let the hidden microphones record her song.

  ‘Terry – that’s not his real name. His real name is Ian Shoesmith. He ran some kind of IT start-up thing in London. Enterprise software. Got loads of money from investors and screwed them over. I think they looked at prosecuting him, but there wasn’t enough evidence. But he was shafted anyway. Not a fit and proper person and all that. Couldn’t be a company director again, and no one was going to employ him. So when Henderson took my idea, and it was totally my idea, to him, he took it up. The idea, back then, was that Terry would do the IT stuff. I’d be in charge of designing what the system had to do. James Wyatt was brought in because they thought they needed an accountant. But really! What did he ever add? You knew more.’

  She’s wrong about Wyatt, as it happens. His real expertise was with the offshore plumbing. The network of accounts in Panama, Belize, the Virgin Islands. I don’t say so though. Just let her talk.

  And talk she does, in sour, extensive detail. She seems affronted that a bunch of gangsters stole her intellectual property. Like she was expecting them to give her share options and a seat on the board.

  I ask if Henderson is in charge.

  ‘No.’ Her no is scathing. ‘There’s some rich guy behind it all. He’s got legitimate money, I think, but Vic says he just invests in whatever promises a return. This looks good, so it gets the investment. Vic says they’ve spent four million already. Obviously got some of that back from’ – she waves her hand at me dismissively – ‘your stuff. But still. Four million.’

  Your stuff: she means the payroll frauds that I and the other moles enacted.

  ‘That barn. The place we were taken to. Is that where the rich guy lives?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve always been blindfolded. I’ve never left the barn. Nor has anyone else. Ram told me they came in the back of a van without windows.’

  I say, ‘That guy who had his hands chopped off. Did you know about that?’

  She says, dismissively, ‘He was stupid. I mean, none of us wanted to do it, but he was talking. He was dangerous. If we hadn’t done it, he could have messed the whole thing up.’

  That sounds like conspiracy to murder to me. It’ll sound that way to a court too. Quintrell doesn’t yet know it, but she’s just upped her maximum sentence from a dozen years or so to life imprisonment. She can hang her pretty blue summer dress up somewhere safe. She won’t be needing it for a while.

  Shoesmith probably doesn’t wear summer dresses, but he’s fucked too. Him, Wyatt, Quintrell, Henderson. We have enough on them now to secure convictions for fraud at a minimum, conspiracy to murder at a maximum. If our colleagues in India come through for us, then Ramesh and his buddies are screwed as well. The UK has a decent extradition treaty with India. And we’ve a decent chance of getting the identifications we need.

  We eat breakfast at six thirty. Break open the plastic-wrapped packs we were handed last night. Cereal. Two slices of bread. Jam. Margarine. I eat my cereal, leave the rest.

  Quintrell talks about herself until eight thirty. She asks nothing about me. At eighty thirty, I pee and wash my hands.

  The act interrupts her self-absorption.

  ‘You, you’ll be all right,’ she tells me. ‘I mean …’ She waves a hand. ‘You’re used to it.’

  I don’t reply. A few minutes later, she’s taken off for interviewing and she’ll learn just how stupid she’s been.

  I’m alone in an empty room. Invisible microphones close on silence.

  39.

  Manchester. Cheadle Heath.

  Another custody suite. More solicitors. Mental-health examiners. More procedures. More searches. But this time I get a cell to myself. I ask for pain relief and get it. I still have a headache, but it’s concentrated round my eye. No longer extends to the entire skull.

  I sleep for ever.

  Morning comes and my first court appearance. I’m charged with fraud and resisting arrest. I plead not guilty.

  The magistrate asks, ‘How did you come by those injuries?’

  I say, ‘I slipped in the shower.’

  The magistrate orders an investigation and yet another report. I’m remanded to custody, to await trial. Two uniformed officers escort me downstairs to an underground car park, mostly full of police patrol cars. But I’m not going in one of those. Brattenbury is there, at the wheel of a silver Lexus with leather seats and exhausts with a lovely deep growl.

  I get in, feeling sore.

  Brattenbury watches solicitously. ‘Head still hurting?’

  ‘A bit.’

  I don’t mention it, but my neck has hurt ever since Henderson slapped me. It would be quite nice to go a few days without anyone hitting me. Or chasing, arresting, imprisoning, handcuffing or blindfolding me.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘A private house. You’ll like it.’

  We drift into silence.

  It’s mid-July, but you wouldn’t guess it. Rain and wind. Grey skies bolted down over sodden earth. Brattenbury drives impatiently, the way I do. Keeping too close to the car in front. Overtaking with a surge of power when he gets the chance.

  Wet tires on wet roads. Wipers like metron
omes. Sidelights on, even though it’s broad daylight.

  ‘Will you charge her with conspiracy?’ I say.

  ‘Not yet. We want to keep that back as a bargaining chip.’

  ‘Anything more on Roy Williams?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘The shop in Ebbw?’

  We’re stopped at lights and Brattenbury slides me a look. ‘Someone came in at opening time. Bought the full list for cash.’

  ‘CCTV?’

  ‘We’re looking at it.’

  ‘The telecoms tower?’

  He laughs. ‘Taking all the bits you’ve given us, we reckon we can narrow the area to about three or four hundred square miles. The southern part of the Brecon Beacons, most likely. That sounds a lot, but you’re only talking about an area twenty miles square. We just need to find a barn and a farmhouse, where the barn has been through some extensive remodeling.’

  ‘Name searches for Nia? Even in Wales, that’s not so common.’

  Brattenbury sees a gap in the traffic and blitzes through it. The sprayback from a lorry up ahead drenches our windscreen and Brattenbury has to put the wiper on full to clear it.

  ‘Fiona. We’re doing everything. We do know how to do this.’

  ‘I know.’ There’s a brief moment when I see myself through the eyes of a superior. Talented but difficult. Hard to manage. I have a moment of clear vision, a windscreen newly cleared of rain. ‘Sorry,’ I say. Then the rain comes again. The spray. The splashback. And I don’t know what I’m apologizing for.

  Brattenbury drives to a place in Altrincham, I think. I don’t really notice. Edwardian houses. Pretty street. Front gardens that smell of rose blooms in the wet. Philadelphus. A taste of orange blossom.

  I feel a sudden surge of emotion. A surge that takes me by surprise and, because I’m unprepared, it takes me a few moments to find any description of it at all. There’s a period – a few seconds maybe – where I don’t know if I’m feeling, happy, sad, angry, frightened, or anything at all. I just feel that rush of internal movement. See the rain shine on wet streets and fallen petals.

  ‘Are you OK?’