The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

by Harry Bingham

  ‘We’ll put the money offshore. Bank account. Your name. You set the passwords and security info. The British police will never find it. You’ll have access to the money, wherever, whenever.’

  ‘Wherever? Literally wherever? Like there’s a cashpoint in Drake Hall?’

  Drake Hall: the prison where Anna Quintrell is currently considering her future.

  ‘Twenty grand. For two weeks in Birmingham, three weeks in London.’

  ‘Get someone else, Vic.’

  He stares at my toenails, as if disconcerted to find them changing color. I’m wearing Aztec print leggings and a tank top. Sitting on the floor with my feet on a towel. Brush in one hand, bottle in the other.

  Poised.

  ‘We’ve tried.’ His voice is hoarse. ‘We’ve made fourteen approaches. Recruited eleven possible candidates. Eight of them were … they were just brainless. Terry did what he could, but they had no idea. They didn’t even complete the training day.’

  ‘So? Eleven minus eight equals three, Vic. I’m trained in payroll, I spot these things.’

  ‘One of them flaked. She was on drugs. We knew about that before we recruited her, but … it didn’t work out. The other two were both caught and fired. Instantly, pretty much. Within the first week.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s fine then. There’s obviously no risk. Silly me to have worried.’

  ‘They were fired. They weren’t arrested.’

  ‘Really? Perhaps they weren’t on police bail at the time.’

  ‘Nor are you. Not Jessica.’

  ‘That waitress. The one at the farmhouse.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You killed her. She was the girl they found in that field.’

  I’m not breaching secrets here, not Fiona Griffiths’s secrets anyway. The deaths were in the newspapers, photographs of Nia before she had her face smashed in.

  ‘Not necessarily me,’ Henderson says automatically.

  ‘You. Geoff. Allan. I don’t care which of you did it. And it was because of me. Because I caused a scene.’

  ‘Not really. It turned out she wasn’t as discreet as we thought.’

  ‘She was a fucking waitress, Vic. She probably didn’t know that having a laugh with a mate was going to get her head beaten to a pulp. I’m guessing you missed that bit off the job description.’

  Vic’s face turns grim. Not at me, particularly, just that he came to do a job which he thought would be easy – offer me twenty K for five more weeks of computer fraud – and it’s turning out hard. He looks at his watch. A chrome and leather aviator thing.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to be somewhere. Why don’t I take you out? Tonight. Somewhere nice. We’ll talk about this stuff. If I can persuade you, great. If not, well, we’ll just have a nice evening.’

  Jessica and I consider that.

  Jessica wants to go, whatever. She’s already thinking about her dress, shoes, hair, and make-up. Fiona Grey isn’t sure. She still has flickers of lust for Henderson, but there’s something about his attitude to murder which she finds something of a passion-killer. She’s old-fashioned that way. So that leaves me, Fiona Griffiths, the capo di tutti capi of our little sisterhood, with the casting vote.

  But it’s not a choice for me, or not really. Roy Williams is still in captivity. Katie Williams still hollow with shock. The ghosts of Hayley Morgan, Saj Kureishi, and now Nia Lewis still look to me for their rescue.

  I shrug. Go back to my toenails. But the shrug was a yes, more than a no, and Henderson accepts it.

  He moves to the door, but says, ‘Do you like spas? Massage, all that stuff?’

  ‘Yes, Vic. Us minimum wage cleaners, we can’t get enough of them.’

  He ignores my sarcasm. Makes a call. A luxury hotel on the bay. Books Jessica in for the afternoon. Any treatments I like. Massage, hot stone, aromatherapy, seaweed. Whatever. Books us both in for dinner in the hotel restaurant later.

  ‘Have a nice time. I’ll see you there later.’

  ‘Do they have a Jacuzzi?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course. All these places do.’

  ‘I’ve never had one. I knew a fell-runner once who said they were amazing.’

  ‘Well, have fun.’

  I shrug. Go back to my toes.

  The pathologist’s report – and this is police information, not public – estimated that Nia Lewis received in excess of fifty blows to the face. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted, but her naked body was thrown into a tangle of nettles hard against a wire fence. One arm had been broken, probably prior to death. The gunshot wound was consistent with Geoff’s Glock, but I’ve no doubt Henderson has something similar available to him.

  I finish painting my toenails, then stand at the window till I see Henderson exiting to the street. Stay watching till I see his BMW roll silently up the road into town.

  I go through to the bedroom and make myself ready for an afternoon at the spa. An evening with a killer.

  46.

  I say yes, of course. Negotiate Henderson from twenty K to fifty. Payable into a bank account on Grand Cayman. My signature. My security questions. My passwords. I say that I won’t do the three weeks in London until the Kiwi visa has been approved.

  Henderson says yes to all that. Finds it funny, really, that I’ve learned security paranoia from him. I don’t think the fifty K was even close to being a deal-breaker. I could probably have pushed for more.

  I also demand to know exactly what my schedule is meant to be.

  ‘It always gets more, what you want,’ I point out. ‘This needs to be the last time it goes up.’

  ‘We pay you more too.’

  ‘It’s never been about money. You know that.’

  ‘OK.’ Henderson gets out his phone. Checks the diary pages on it. Gives me my dates for Birmingham. Two weeks there. Three weeks in London.

  ‘Those three weeks in London. You go live after that?’

  ‘Yes. In five weeks’ time.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And we’ll want you for a weekend, as well please.’

  ‘Are you propositioning me?’

  He smiles at that, but it’s not much of a smile. His mind is on business, not sex.

  ‘The farmhouse. Our final round of testing. It’ll be right after Birmingham.’ He gives me the dates. September 22 and 23. A year, pretty much, since I first sat in that furniture superstore with Huw Bowen smelling Kevin-from-Swindon’s body odor. Calculating forwards, it looks like Tinker is planning to launch its fake software in mid-October. We’re five weeks from the biggest theft in history. I hope Brattenbury is listening. Hope he knows I’ve just ticked off the third of the three objectives he gave me.

  ‘I won’t wear the hood again,’ I say. ‘The eye-mask thing was OK.’

  A small hesitation but, ‘All right. As you wish.’

  ‘And it’ll be an extra ten K.’

  ‘Ten thousand pounds? For a weekend?’

  ‘No. Ten thousand pounds for seventeen years in jail. That’s five hundred quid a year, a bit more than one pound a day.’

  Henderson looks at me. He’s amused more than anything. He has dark hairs peeping from the join in his white shirt and I can see the two colors of blue in his eyes. Rain clouds flecked with the tropics. Cobalt shimmering on a dark Welsh sea.

  They don’t move me now. Not really. Not me, not Fiona Grey, not Jessica. We catch killers. We don’t sleep with them.

  But Henderson doesn’t know that. He says yes to my ten grand. Pours wine.

  I don’t sleep with killers, I catch them, but sometimes the two rivers run close. And after dinner, after the light had died on the Bay, after the amuse-bouches and the complimentary champagne and the artisanal breads and the seven-course tasting menu and the coffees and the petits fours, I say, ‘Do you have a room?’ Henderson doesn’t reply directly. Just calls a waiter over. Has the whole thing arranged without leaving table.

  He finishes his coffee, I play with my petit four, then we go up. Side by side in the elevat
or, hardly talking.

  He let us into the room. Not a room, even. A suite. Huge glass windows over the sea. No curtains, not meaningfully, because aside from the big ships heading up or down the estuary, there’s no one there to gaze at us. There are a couple of side lamps switched on by the bed. Some wall lamps in the sitting room. Henderson stands back, watching to see what I want. Ready to do whatever it is. More lights, less. Music. Champagne.

  But I don’t want any of that. I like the deadness of the light. The huge grey bay waiting like a boneyard beyond the glass.

  I stand at the foot of the bed and shrug slightly.

  I’m wearing a dress that I chose, not Jessica. A little black number. Not too tarty. Not too glam. Just a dress.

  Date-wear. The sort of dress that might say sex, but doesn’t have to.

  Henderson comes up close. Kisses me on the lips. A little bite as he finishes.

  He’s low on the foreplay, though. I think he figures that an afternoon and evening in a luxury spa, plus sixty grand for five weeks’ work, has pretty much covered him on the foreplay front. If he isn’t pushier now, I think that’s only because he knows Miss Grey can be a bit of a wildcat.

  I reach behind my shoulder blades. Find the zip and release it. I suddenly feel very naked. Stop the dress falling beyond my waist, then realize that’s stupid and let it drop to the floor. Put my hands to Henderson’s jacket and shirt. Encourage him to join me in this nakedness.

  He does.

  There’s a brief moment when we’re both in our underwear. Black M&S stuff in my case. I think the same in his.

  There’s something missing, however, and I think even Henderson feels it. When we were kissing through the hood, or even earlier when he came to my room in the barn with the bags of clothes from Gap, we both felt a kind of passion that was as hungry, at least in my case, as anything I’ve ever known.

  It’s not like that now. The negotiations over money, the sense of mounting risk, the abduction of Roy Williams and the death of Tania Lewis, those things have all killed what there once was.

  A darkened ocean beats time beyond the windows and I sit on the bed. Say, ‘Was it you who killed Tania Lewis?’

  He looks at me sharply, but says, ‘No.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you …? She was really hurt.’

  ‘We didn’t hurt her much beforehand. She died from a gunshot. Most of what happened to her happened after that.’

  ‘But you helped. You helped do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the guy in that video?’

  ‘Yes. That was me. The man concerned had become significantly dangerous. Stole money, started talking. And he wasn’t a waitress. He did know the score.’

  ‘What is it like? Killing someone.’

  ‘You stabbed someone once.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘I have my job, Fi. I’m tasked to keep things secure and I do. That’s it, really. I don’t have big feelings about it.’

  My dress lies in a pool of black viscose at my feet. I pick at it. Finding the shoulder straps. Lifting it, until an unfilled torso rises from the pool. A dark shape, waiting for me to enter it.

  Vic’s shirt lies on the floor next to my dress. A dark blue number, with a bit of shine. He is well-muscled. The kind of body you only get from the gym. Taut biceps curling into well-developed deltoids. A cloud of dark hair wanders across his chest. Bronze light reflects from his skin.

  I rub my fingers into his chest. Look into the two colors of his eyes.

  It doesn’t move me any more. The chest, the eyes, anything.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this, Vic. I’m sorry. Not now. Not while everything is still …’

  He doesn’t answer directly. His mouth is a line of grimness, but his eyes are softer. Eventually he says, ‘It’s OK. It was probably a bad idea.’

  ‘My bad idea. I’ll pay for the room.’

  ‘No. Don’t worry about it.’

  He lifts my ankle. I’m still wearing my tights and they bulge over the ankle bracelet. I wriggle out of the tights. He inserts a cable into the output socket, enters a code via a handset, and wipes the past two hours’ recording. Checks it twice to make sure it’s gone. As he does all that, I pull my dress back on, my tights. Apologize again.

  The data is gone. I’m dressed. Henderson gets a cold beer from the minibar. Asks me if I want anything, but I don’t.

  He grins over his beer at me. He only spoke as freely as he did just now, because this was his choice of hotel, because the room was booked last minute, because he knows that I have not been approached by the police nor, indeed, have I been anywhere except my own flat or the hotel itself since the plan to come here was concocted.

  A raft of precautions. A row of green lights.

  But even Henderson can fuck up, and he did just now.

  I did have my afternoon at the spa. Got a massage, which was nice: I’ve never had one before. Also booked in for a seaweed wrap, because it sounded like the single stupidest thing on the spa’s long list of very stupid things. But I didn’t get to the wrap, because the woman on the massage table next to me was Susan Knowles. We smiled at each other, but barely spoke.

  Then, after we’d each been rubbed and pounded, we moved through to the Jacuzzi. I sat on the edge, dangling my ankle in the foaming water. My ankle bracelet, with its oh-so-sensitive audio recording, listening to the noise of a million bubbles. A surge of water and the beat of a pump.

  ‘Hey, Susan, nice to see you.’

  ‘You too, blonde girl. Good thinking about the Jacuzzi.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure if anyone would get my fell-runner reference.’

  ‘Adrian knows that I run. But if it hadn’t been me, we’d have sent someone else.’

  We chatted a bit. How’s Adrian. News from the case. Buzz sent his love. But mostly we were quickly down to business.

  ‘I want to get a confession tonight,’ I said. ‘Can you get the restaurant wired up?’

  ‘We’re on it already. The simplest thing is just to put recorders in the salt cellars. Something like that. We’ll do every table probably.’

  ‘And a room maybe? If we go upstairs afterwards.’ Susan raised her eyebrows, but I was quick to add, ‘I don’t think he would ever speak in a public place. Even if he felt sure it was secure. A bedroom, maybe. I’m not sure. It’s worth a try. I won’t go all the way.’

  Susan looked hard at me and said, ‘You know, your man Brydon, ages ago, he came to us and said that if you had to do something – get intimate, whatever – in order to secure a conviction, then he’d understand. He just said you should never tell him. Never let him know.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It was Adrian he spoke to. Adrian just said that there was absolutely no question of you becoming intimate with anyone. That that wasn’t your role in the case.’

  That sounds like Buzz to me. Like Brattenbury too. Both doing the right thing. The professional thing. But it would kill Buzz, I think. And ‘never tell him’ is all very well. But if I secured evidence essential to a prosecution, that evidence would have to be aired in court, no matter where I obtained it.

  I don’t know what my face said, but Susan said, ‘He’s a good man, your one. Hang on to him.’

  I nodded, dumbly. Thinking that for this long year Buzz must have had half a worry that I wasn’t just working undercover but working under the covers too. A Welsh Mata Hari.

  ‘Anyway. We’ll put a room aside for you. And record the hell out of it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She looked at me and grinned. Gave me a hug.

  ‘We’d best keep this short,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Not long now.’

  Nod.

  ‘And make sure you get the bastard.’

  By now, I expect, she knows I did.

  When I leave the hotel that night, walking back to my flat, still feeling th
e touch of that almost-intimacy on my skin, I think of how much it has taken us all to get here. Hayley Morgan and her purposeless sacrifice. Saj Kureishi and his anguished astonishment. Nia Lewis, in her tangle of nettles and wire netting. But Buzz too. His honorable waiting. Dennis Jackson and his gruff, senior-officer kindness. Brattenbury’s professionalism, Susan’s intelligence.

  I’ve got Anna Quintrell in jail. Henderson now on record as confessing to murder. Wyatt and Shoesmith in our crosshairs. Ramesh and his buddies too.

  If we get them, we’re likely to find enough to get Geoff and Allan too. When we rip into the house searches, the forensics, the interrogations, we’re pretty much certain to get the leads we need. Geoff, Allan, plus some of the others involved in finance and distribution.

  But that’s not enough. The Hendersons, the Wyatts, the Quintrells – they’re not enough. I don’t just want them: the salarymen and women of this particular crime. I want the person I’ve never heard mentioned. I want whoever it is that owns the farmhouse. I want whoever has four million pounds of seed capital to fund this venture. When Brattenbury and I have sketched Tinker’s hypothetical organization chart, we’ve always had a space that just says, The Boss – ???. And I want that man. In jail for fraud and murder. A life sentence. Some huge minimum tariff.

  So far, we’ve not had the glimmer of a clue as to that person’s identity. We don’t, if we’re honest, even know that the person exists. But Henderson walked from his osteopath’s office into the building next door, presumably in order to see someone. You don’t do that – find a building with that odd connecting door arrangement, attend a long sequence of osteopathy appointments, then use that cover to skip next door for an hour before returning the same way – unless you are seeking to cover something up.

  Something – but what? I don’t know, but for the first time I feel we have a tangible clue. I hope Brattenbury feels the same excitement. I guess he would, except that I think he was nudging me to lower my expectations. His letter said, We’re applying for surveillance warrants for that other building now. Fingers crossed on that.

  Fingers crossed: a reminder of the legalities involved. Thus far, there’s been little difficulty in getting authority to surveille, bug and tap almost everything we’ve wanted. Our legal argument has been textbook in its straightforwardness. Roughly speaking: we know, or have a very strong and evidentially based suspicion, that this person (Henderson, Quintrell, Allan, Shoesmith, Wyatt) is involved in criminal fraud and conspiracy to murder. We want to bug their home/phone/mobile/whatever. Easy.