‘Where are we?’
‘This is a colleague’s house. He and his wife are away for a few weeks, I thought it would be nicer for you to stay in a real family home than a hotel.’
‘Oh.’
That phrase family home gives me the clue. I’ve spent so long away from all of that – from my house, from Buzz’s flat, from my parents’ home – that I find myself moved and disconcerted to be here in this wet street, these quiet gardens. As though the kind of life they promise is still a possibility.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Is Buzz going to be here?’
‘Buzz?’
‘David Brydon. My fiancé.’
‘He’s coming this afternoon. We’ll have debriefs most days. Long ones to begin with. You and – did you say Buzz? – can have the rest of the time together. We’ll still need to process you through the courts, but you’re on record as being held at Cheadle Heath. You might have to do some nights there, just to maintain the legend.’
‘That’s fine. And yes, I’m OK.’
I don’t move though.
It’s strange to know that I can just walk up and down this street. Go to the shops, eat a meal, chat with a neighbor. I can be Fiona Grey or Fiona Griffiths, it doesn’t really matter.
It feels almost like that time outside the hotel. The air bubble. Neither color nor weight. Only it’s different this time. Like it’s a good weightlessness, not a bad one. It’s as though I feel both my lives walking in front of me and realize I can choose either one.
A sense of potential.
‘What about Western Vale? I’ve been fired, I assume?’
‘Just a bit.’ He laughs. The laugh says, You’re very fired.
‘What about my cleaning?’
‘I don’t know. They probably just think you’ve gone AWOL.’
I nod. Cleaners come and go. The ultimate transient workforce. When I stop turning up for work, my boss will just replace me. I wonder who Lowri is coughing at now. But I’ll miss it, the cleaning. I never liked payroll.
‘Are you OK to go in?’
‘Yes.’
But I don’t move. Brattenbury thinks this is the end. Not of the operation, but of my role in it. The public arrest. The criminal charges. The unlamented collapse of my career in payroll.
This, in undercover terms, is the start of my reintegration. The nice house in a pleasant district. Time spent getting to know Buzz again. A gentle reintroduction to my old job, my old commitments. It’s everything I’m meant to want.
Please don’t be concerned.
I say, ‘I can’t forget Roy Williams.’
‘Nor can any of us.’
‘I’d like to see Katie, please. When she’s ready. When there’s time.’
‘Of course. We’ve already asked her and she’s said she wants to see you.’
‘He’s in that farmhouse, isn’t he? I was a hundred feet from him.’
‘Probably.’
We do know how to do this.
‘Have you arrested James Wyatt?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Ian Shoesmith?’
‘Not yet.’
First intelligence, then arrests. The SOCA way.
‘He was nice, Ian, Terry, whatever you want to call him. He helped me at Monopoly.’
‘So we shouldn’t arrest him?’
‘No, we should just arrest him nicely.’
We’re doing everything.
Brattenbury thinks that this is the end for Fiona Grey, but I’m not so sure. My cover is now perfect, beyond question. And little Fiona may yet have her uses.
The rain starts to clear. The pavement starts to shine with an apologetic sunlight. The Lexus engine ticks softly as it cools.
Buzz is coming this afternoon and I realize I do want to see him. I’m not sure what that thing with Henderson was – lust? fear? isolation? – but I feel insulated from it now. Seeing Buzz will be strange, but good-strange, I think.
I open my car door.
‘OK. Let’s do it.’
And we do.
40.
Buzz says, ‘You’ve lost weight.’
He says, ‘Your hair’s longer.’
He says, as he gives me a bunch of yellow roses in a pale blue jug, ‘I got these, because I thought you’d prefer something simple.’
He says, as he shows me the suitcase of my own clothes he’s brought from my house, ‘I didn’t know what you’d want, so I asked your sister to help choose.’
He says, as he soaps my back in the large white rolltop bath with claw feet that stands in the prettily decorated upstairs bathroom, ‘Your face, babe. It looks terrible.’
He says, as we go through to the bedroom, and the big white bed, and the rose-patterned wallpaper and the sweet peas in a glass on the window sill, ‘We can take it slow.’
And I say, as I lie beside him afterwards, staring up at the ceiling and burying my hand in the thickets of his hair, ‘Oh Buzz, I would get so lost without you.’ And we press up close and I don’t talk much and don’t let him talk much except that, when we get hungry, he’s allowed to walk downstairs naked to the kitchen and come back with brown bread and butter and smoked salmon and (for him) a bottle of beer. And we eat sitting up in bed, telling each other off when we drop crumbs onto the sheets, and we lick each other’s fingers clean, and when Buzz settles back with his beer, I sip the foam from the head and start nibbling the hillock of muscle at the top of his arm.
Slowly – because I’m not very alert to these things at times – I realize that there is a feeling spreading outwards from my belly. At first, I thought it had something to do with the bread and salmon: a feeling of being replete. Then, as I belatedly turn my attention to the sensation, I think, This isn’t what I usually feel like after food. I’m perplexed enough that I start interrogating the feeling the way I used to. The way my doctors used to train me. Try to name the feeling, Fiona. Just see what fits. Is it fear? Anger? Jealousy? Love? Happiness? Disgust? Yearning? Curiosity? Most of those feelings, I can quickly discard. The feeling is quieter than most things, so not curiosity, or fear, or anger, or jealousy. Quieter than those, and warmer.
I remember once sitting in a stairwell, bum on a concrete step, wearing a floaty mint-green dress and strappy shoes and thinking, This is love. Love, plus a good splash of happiness. I had just starting dating Buzz and he had just kissed me. That feeling then: it was a bit like this.
I say, to myself more than anything, ‘I think I might be happy.’
Buzz laughs at me. ‘You think? You don’t know?’
‘It’s complicated. Or at least, it is for me. I don’t know how it is for other people.’
Buzz strokes my hair and the stroke turns into a long rub which ends at my knees, with stops en route to explore sites of particular local interest. I kiss his neck.
‘You just feel something and that’s it. You feel it.’
In philosophical terms, I’d say that Buzz’s position makes him a strong non-cognitivist, a reputable position to adopt, even if it isn’t mine. But I don’t think he’s seeking that kind of discussion. I keep a hand on my belly, feeling the warmth. Its settled, confident glow.
Happiness. This is happiness.
I roll over in bed, facing Buzz. Say, ‘Can we look at wedding dresses soon?’
‘Yes, love, of course we can.’
Love and happiness: the sunshine twins.
41.
Long debriefings: Brattenbury wasn’t kidding.
I’d hoped that I could stay in the house, but Brattenbury wants me at the SOCA office in Manchester. I don’t have my car here, so Buzz drives me in. He’s been given some liaison project with the Greater Manchester Police, and goes on there afterwards.
Brattenbury leads the debriefing, but Mervyn Rogers is there, representing our force, and Susan Knowles leads anything to do with IT.
Until you’ve done one of these things, you can’t quite imagine the detail. We start with the people. Who I saw. My impression o
f their attitudes, expertise, emotional position, relationship with colleagues, and much more. Also identifications. It’s easy to confirm that ‘Terry’ is Ian Shoesmith. Ditto James Wyatt. I make the identification from surveillance photos and sign a statement confirming the match. That’s not something we need for investigative purposes, but we need to keep an eye on what a court will expect in due course.
We make progress also with Ram and his colleagues. We have a limited amount of material from India, but we have CCTV from Heathrow, passenger lists, and some immigration data, topped up with various industry magazines and websites from Bangalore. I identify Ramesh and one colleague, Dilip Krishnaswamy, with certainty. Their two colleagues with moderate confidence only.
We get nowhere on Geoff. Nowhere on Allan, Geoff’s Glock-wielding colleague. I’m pretty sure that both of them have a military background, but plenty of people do. Allan has that characteristic way of rubbing his beard as he plays Monopoly, but we don’t yet have a database that can make use of that insight.
Nowhere also with any of the people involved in the distribution discussions. Nowhere on Nia. And nowhere with any of the people who might have been over in the farmhouse, who might or might not have been present that first evening when I launched myself at Henderson. I work with an e-fit specialist to produce images of Geoff and Allan. I think the one of Geoff is reasonably accurate. Allan, I’m not so sure about. I get a vaguely reasonable picture of Nia, the waitress.
But still, Brattenbury is pleased to have a good, arrestable list of names. The images of Geoff and Allan are circulated to all police forces in the United Kingdom. Shoesmith and Wyatt remain under close observation.
In a regular police operation, surveillance might last as little as twenty-four hours before we made arrests. Classically, we’d want to wait until we had enough evidence to warrant prosecution, then go in hard, fast and nasty, using the evidence we have to secure more. When suspects see how fucked they really are, they start to calculate, correctly, that their best chance of reducing their jail terms is by cooperating. That doesn’t always happen, but it happens often enough to make it a game worth playing.
SOCA operates differently. Its close connection to the intelligence services gives it a preference for the long game, the subtle collection of data. I think if we were in a normal situation, that would be Brattenbury’s preference too. Play it delicate, play it slow.
But this isn’t a normal situation. Roy Williams, a police officer and our colleague, has been abducted. All of us think of Sajid Kureishi, but I’m the only one who has actually watched that killing. Kureishi’s rapid, terrified talking. His arms taut against their bindings. That savage, repeated hacking. That changing face. The anguish and the pain.
I’m OK with dead people but Kureishi isn’t really dead, for me. He’s just frozen in his dying. Like one of those ancient Greek torments, which the victim is doomed to repeat for ever, unable to escape, even by death.
I want Roy Williams to avoid that fate. Katie too.
We have infinite strategy discussions, but they all come back to a simple conclusion. We can’t close down the operation, until we get Williams back. Which means locating the farmhouse. And not merely locating it, but entering with enough speed and force to preserve Roy’s life. A big ask.
Brattenbury says, ‘And of course we have to be alert to the risk that …’ No one wants to say it, but Brattenbury has to. ‘That they apply pressure. Inflict torture.’
That word. That thought.
It crouches in the room with us, an alien third party, discomfiting us. As though our nostrils were already catching the whiff of electrical burns on skin. Our ears hearing the gasp of breath struggling against wet cloth.
The implications ripple outwards too.
Roy doesn’t know much about the broader investigation. Doesn’t have many secrets to spill. But he does have one: and I am she.
I feel the looks of my fellow investigators clustering on my face.
I say, carefully, ‘It’s possible, but I doubt it. Everything points away from it. Evidence obtained by torture is known to be unreliable, and Roy is hardly going to be a soft touch. Plus, if these guys are sophisticated enough to detect an undercover officer, they probably also know a bit about standard operating procedure. If they do, that’ll tell them Roy doesn’t know too much. And then again, these guys are mostly silkily efficient. They’re not thugs. Even with Kureishi, where they knew the guy had been stealing from them, the whole murder was accomplished in a matter of two or three minutes.’
Minutes which I watched, and no one else here did.
People discuss my comments – most people agree with my assessment – and the conversation moves on. But I still get more than my share of looks. And the smell of burned flesh lingers.
In the meantime, those debriefings run on and on. The first day is spent mostly on faces, names and identities. Days two and three focus exclusively on IT. Susan Knowles leads things. She’s in her element here and for the first time, I understand the depth of her expertise. Always well dressed and impeccable – dark skirts, businesslike jackets, that gorgeous Venetian hair tied back in a knot – she tries to understand exactly the system design and how far advanced it is. My ignorance is frustratingly extensive. Although I heard endless hours of Ramesh and Ian ‘Terry’ Shoesmith talking about these things, I understood so little of what I heard that it’s hard for Susan to extract what she needs.
But a picture emerges. It seems that Shoesmith has managed to steal or otherwise obtain the program code for an old version of TPS software. He and Ramesh are currently seeking to adapt that code: bringing it up to date and inserting the ‘skim’.
At one point, early on, someone asks Susan how hard it would be to have the software skim funds.
‘Easy. A few lines of code. The hard part is Fiona’s part’ – she means getting the payroll part of things up to date and accurate – ‘then distributing the software, and getting any stolen money offshore and laundered.’
‘And distributing the software. Just how do they do that?’
‘They’ve got a few different options. One, they can seek to take over the software supplier’s own systems. That would be the best way: you would actually get a global software company distributing your infected software and you could, theoretically, reach pretty much every one of its customers.
‘But it wouldn’t be easy. To achieve it you’d either need an accomplice – probably a few accomplices – in the software company, or you’d need to have obtained a backdoor route by some other means. Some kind of sophisticated hacking operation. Trouble is, we’ve arrested Quintrell and, of course, Fiona. Tinker must be aware that we’ve penetrated them, at least to some extent. So although their initial objective was probably to attack the supplier, they must be aware that that route is going to be more protected than normal.
‘But there is an alternative. It’s not as good, but still very viable. If you can’t hit the software supplier itself, you could obtain access to the customers themselves, firms like Western Vale. You’d need a way to replace their legitimate payroll software with your infected copy. That could be quite easy, depending on access, but you’d have to work customer by customer. You’d basically need another Saj Kureishi, planting dodgy software everywhere he went.’
Brattenbury asks, ‘So you would need physical access to those corporate computer systems?’
Knowles says, ‘Ideally, yes. But how would you get physical access to enough corporate systems to make it worth your while? Realistically, you’d probably have to figure out a way to access those systems from outside. A lot of corporates have weaknesses in their computer security, but even so, you’d have to approach every single firm as a different challenge.’
We also talk extensively about timings. Shoesmith’s timetable said, ‘Specify, program, beta-launch, full launch.’ I’m pretty sure we’re midway through the beta-launch, with more testing yet to go. But what then? When does full launch happen? And will that
be corporate-by-corporate, or in one huge roll-out?
We don’t know. Once again, our ignorance is frustratingly great.
We discuss these things endlessly, but keep coming back to two central threats.
The first is Shoesmith’s Fuck It button. If Tinker’s software gets distributed widely enough, that button could cause tens of millions of pounds to vanish almost literally overnight. However quick the remedial action, the theft would still be colossal. Some large firms could even be bankrupted by the loss.
That line of thinking says, Play safe, don’t screw around, make some arrests. Put payroll systems into lockdown. Deploy armed guards in corporate software suites, if you have to.
Except, if we do that, we come to the second horrendous risk: that we lose Roy Williams. Lose him, and fail to catch the big bad guys who are directing Tinker. At the moment, the most senior man in our sights seems to be Vic Henderson, and none of us believe that he’s any more than some security ops guy. The brains – and the profits – lie elsewhere.
Briefings and discussions run all week.
Meantime, elsewhere, an inquiry team of more than a hundred officers is chasing every possible lead.
Planning departments have been checked for barn conversions which tally with the measurements I’ve provided, but nothing appears to tally exactly. Loads of buildings that tally approximately.
We’ve sent young police officers, out of uniform, into pubs right across the area, south of the Brecon Beacons, where we think the farmhouse is located. They’re briefed to look out for any Nias who fit my description. Also to start conversations about brawls at posh cocktail parties and see if they can catch any gossip about my own little presentation. So far, we’ve achieved nothing at all.
SOCA’s spooks did apply for an interception warrant on the osteopath’s office. The application was turned down. A SOCA guy made an appointment for osteopathy himself – an old problem with his shoulder – and reports that the osteopath seemed competent and knowledgeable. Interestingly, though, there are two doors into the osteopath’s office. One, the door that patients use. The other a locked door, which gives access into the building next door. Brattenbury says, ‘The door’s left over from when the building was divided down the middle a few years back. The stuff next door is a property management company. Accountants on the top floor. Solicitors on the bottom floor. We’ve adjusted our video coverage on the front so we can survey both offices. We’ve photographed the appointments book at the health center and all the visitor sign-in books at the offices next door. We’re going through all that now.’
The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths Page 26