The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

  THE STRANGE DEATH

  OF FIONA GRIFFITHS

  HARRY BINGHAM

  To my beloved N.

  ‘The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for

  our wits to grow sharper.’

  Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Afterword

  A Note on Cotard’s Syndrome

  About the Author

  Also by Harry Bingham

  Copyright

  1

  September 2011

  I like the police force. I like its rules, its structures. I like the fact that, most of the time, we are on the side of ordinary people. Sorting out their road accidents and petty thefts. Preventing violence, keeping order. In the words of our bland but truthful corporate slogan, we’re Keeping South Wales Safe. That’s a task worth doing and one I enjoy. Only, Gott im Himmel, the job can be tedious.

  Right now, I’m sitting in a cramped little office above the stockroom at a furniture superstore on the Newport Road. I’m here with a DS, Huw Bowen, recently transferred from Swansea. A finance guy from Swindon is shoving spreadsheets at me and looking at me with pained, watery eyes. We have been here forty minutes.

  Bowen takes the topmost spreadsheet and runs a thick finger across it. It comprises a column of names, a row of months, a block of numbers.

  ‘So these are the payments?’ says Bowen.

  ‘Correct.’

  The finance guy from Swindon wears a plastic security pass clipped to his jacket pocket. Kevin Tildesley.

  ‘So all these people have been paid all these amounts?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Tax deducted, national insurance, everything?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly.’

  The only window in the office looks out over the shop floor itself. We’re up on the top storey, so we’re on a level with the fluorescent lighting and what seems like miles of silver ducting. The superstore version of heaven.

  Bowen still hasn’t got it. He’s a nice guy, but he’s as good with numbers as I am at singing opera.

  I bite down onto my thumb, hard enough to give myself a little blue ledge of pain. I let my mind rest on that ledge, while the scenario in front of me plays itself out. I’m theoretically here to take notes, but my pad is mostly blank.

  ‘And these are all employees? Contracts in place? Bank accounts in order? Anything else, I don’t know . . . pension plans and all that?’

  ‘Yes. They are all contracted employees. We have their contracts. Their bank details. Their addresses. Everything. But two of the people – these two,’ he says, circling two names on the spreadsheet, ‘these two don’t actually exist.’

  Bowen stares at him.

  His mouth says nothing. His eyes say, ‘So why. The fuck. Were you paying them?’

  Kevin starts to get into the detail. Again.

  He tries to puff his chest out to take control of this interview, but he doesn’t have much chest to puff. The room smells of body odour.

  Anyway. We go round again. The Kevin and Huw show.

  Payroll is handled centrally but data is entered locally. Head office routinely ‘audits’ local payroll data, but what Kevin means by that is simply that the entire company’s data is fed into a computer program that looks for implausible or impossible results. The two phantom names – Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan – didn’t ring any alarm bells.

  ‘So, for example,’ Kevin tells us, ‘if we find multiple payroll entries that share the same address or the same bank account, we’d be very suspicious. Ditto, if there are no deductions being made for tax or if overtime claims seem unnaturally high. So basically, we’ve done an audit-quality data check.’

  His voice is high and pressured. I realise that he’s worried about his own job. He’s the Head Office guy who was meant to make sure this kind of thing didn’t happen. And here it is: having happened. The fraud only came to light when the superstore got an enquiry from the bank of one of the recipients.

  I ask how much money has been lost.

  Kevin starts to answer. His voice catches. He drinks water from a bottle. Then, ‘Thirty-eight thousand pounds. Over two financial years.’

  Bowen and I look at each other. Steal £38,000 and you’re looking at a two-year prison sentence, give or take. It’s too big a fraud for us to ignore, but I can already see Bowen wondering how he can dodge this one. Give him a good bit of GBH or assault with intent, and Bowen is your man. Give him an investigation full of spreadsheets and people with plastic badges called Kevin from Swindon and Bowen, big man that he is, looks pale with fear. This shouldn’t really even be our case. Huw and I are both attached to Major Crimes, and this case is strictly Fraud Squad. Only there’s a sad lack of violent death in South Wales at the moment, while our colleagues in Fraud keep on getting sick or taking jobs in the private sector.

  So we’re here, with Kevin. A stack of manila folders sits on the desk in front of him. The personnel files for this branch. All of them. Current employees, past employees, temporary and part-time staff. Everyone.

  Bowen looks at them. He looks at me.

  Kevin looks at us both and says, ‘These are copies. For you.’

  2

  Bowen and I fight. I lose.

  Neither of us wanted to take the case. Bowen, because he’s terrified someone will ask him to add up. Me, because people always want to chuck the paperwork-heavy cases my way and I spend my life trying to avoid them.

  I’d hoped that because Bowen was, in Cardiff terms, a newbie, I might just have the edge in this particular turf war. Shows how little I know. Bowen is older than me, senior to me, is a man, drinks beer and used to play rugby, and all those things count for more than anything I can muster. Bowen is assigned to a simple little manslaughter case – no investigative depth, the likely perpetrator already in custody, but still: a proper crime and a proper corpse – and I get to play with Kevin from Swindon.

  When I complained, DI Owen Dunwoody, who gave me the assignment, told me to think of it as a good career-case. ‘Not p
articularly fun, but very solvable. Good promotion fodder.’

  When I complained again, Dunwoody said, ‘We all have to do things we don’t enjoy.’

  When I complained again, Dunwoody said, ‘Fiona, just do your bloody job.’

  So here I am, up on Fairoak Road, doing my bloody job. A brisk day with a shiver of rain.

  The place I need, a brick-built block of flats, lies opposite the cemetery. Would offer one of the best views in Cardiff except that the houses here choose to turn their backs on the dead, offering up garages and back gardens to the graveyard, instead of facing it front on.

  I park off-street, in a resident’s bay. A cluster of grey plastic bins watches disapprovingly.

  Flat 2E. Mrs Adele Gibson.

  Kevin isn’t quite right to say that Adele Gibson doesn’t exist. She does. She may or may not have helped sell cut-price faux-leather sofas in a superstore on the Newport Road, but she exists all right. Council tax. Electoral roll. Phone.

  I ring her bell.

  Nothing.

  Ring it again. Keep the buzzer pressed down for twenty seconds, but nada, nothing.

  I’m about to start trying other bells in the block, when a car enters the car park and stops. A blue Citroën Berlingo, with its nearside trim missing. A man gets out, opens the back and starts fussing with a ramp. An electric wheelchair hums out backwards. Cerebral palsy, I guess, seeing the woman in the chair. Fortyish. Clean hair.

  The man closes the car. The pair approach the house.

  ‘Adele Gibson?’ I ask the woman. ‘I’m looking for a Mrs Gibson.’

  ‘Not me,’ says the woman.

  The man opens the front door, but doesn’t want to let me inside. ‘A security thing,’ he says.

  I show him my warrant card. ‘A police thing,’ I say.

  The woman who isn’t Adele Gibson enjoys her minder’s comeuppance.

  The corridors inside are wide and there’s a lift, even though the block is only three storeys high. Laminated fire notices in large text and bright colours.

  ‘This is sheltered housing, is it?’ I ask. ‘Are there staff on site?’

  The man gives me the answers. Yes and no respectively. It’s a council-owned facility designed to be disability friendly, but intended for residents who can live semi-independently.

  The woman hums off down the corridor, the man following on behind. A smell of curry.

  Upstairs. Knock on the door at 2E. Nothing.

  I call Jon Breakell in the office. He’s the other poor sod who’s been lumbered with this case. I ask him to contact social services, find out what the deal is with Adele Gibson. He says OK and asks if I’m coming back for lunch.

  I’m not. The furniture company’s other phantom lives up in Blaengwynfi, in the country above Aberkenfig. Jon says he’ll call me when he gets something.

  I’m in a bad mood as I start the drive, but the miles and the mountains start to soften my ill temper. There’s something about these mining towns – the cramped valleys and injured mountains – which feels truthful to me, more truthful than anything you can find in Cardiff.

  Bracken on the hills. Water flashing white and silver in the streams.

  Buzzards.

  The cottage in Blaengwynfi stands above the main village, up on the hill. A metalled road runs as far as a small line of four new brick houses, then gives up. A cattle grid marks the boundary to the open hill and an unmetalled driveway runs the remaining two hundred yards to the cottage. Crushed rock for the tyre tracks, grass growing freely in between. Sheep wander across the road.

  I drive up to the cottage.

  It’s small. Probably just two bedrooms. Green painted front door. A modest effort at a garden. Low stone wall keeping the sheep off. No lights.

  A red Toyota Corolla sits outside a wooden garage next to the house. Water butt. Log store.

  There’s no bell so I knock at the door. Wait long enough that I’m within my rights to peer through all the windows, but I don’t see anything much. Net curtains in what I think must be the kitchen. There’s a smell, like that of a manure heap, only not as sweet, not as grassy.

  Drive back to the little group of four houses lower down the hill. Knock on a couple of doors until I find a neighbour. Ask about Hayley Morgan. The woman I ask looks blank, until I point up at the cottage, then says what people say when they don’t know the people they live next to. ‘Oh, Mrs Morgan, keeps herself to herself really. Doesn’t cause any trouble.’

  I can feel her curiosity tugging at me, like a kite on a string.

  I don’t give her what she wants. Knock on the two other doors. Get another don’t-know-don’t-care from a mother who has a fag in her mouth and a TV on loud in the front room.

  I’m just heading back into the valley when my phone bleeps with a text. I was probably out of signal higher up. Jon Breakell. BIT WEIRD. CALL ME.

  I call him.

  ‘Oh hey, Fi. Look, I just got off the phone with social services. There’s been some problem with Adele Gibson’s bank account. Money’s been going into it from the furniture place but it’s gone straight out again. That’s been going on for a while apparently, some sort of bank cock-up, but just recently, the last eight weeks, all the money has gone out. Social security money. Disability living allowance. Whatever. Anything that’s been paid into the account has gone straight out again.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Don’t know. The payments are made out to a T.M. Baron. I’m trying to trace him now.’

  Jon starts telling me what he’s doing with social services and how he’s going to trace T.M. Baron, but I cut him off. ‘Later.’

  Drive back up the hill. Fast, springs protesting at the potholes.

  I’m a city girl but I’ve spent enough time on my Aunt Gwyn’s farm to know the smell of manure, and that wasn’t manure. At the cottage I knock again for form’s sake but I’m already looking for a rock. Try to slide one out from the garden wall. I don’t manage but I do find one erupting, like an oversized molar, from the muddy verge beyond.

  Wrench it out. Heave it through the living room window. Reach through the broken glass for the catch. Open the window, sweep the worst of the glass off the shelf and slide myself inside, taking a pair of latex gloves from the car before I do.

  The smell is stronger here. Definite. It’s like the smell you get from chicken left too long in the fridge. A smell that combines the damp meatiness of mushrooms, the gamey quality of hung fowl, the choking quality of ammonia. All that, only intensified. Compacted.

  The living room has two armchairs – blue, velvet covered, old – and some thin cotton curtains. Some books. A TV. Fireplace.

  The standby lamp on the TV is not illuminated. Gloves on, I flick a light switch. Nothing happens. An old-fashioned phone on a side table, but no dialling tone when I lift the receiver.

  Go through to the kitchen, passing a tiny hall, flagstones on the floor, wooden stairs leading up. Mail, too much of it, by the door.

  The whole house is cold.

  Hayley Morgan lies in her kitchen.

  She looks tiny, frail. Like a thing flung, not a person fallen.

  She’s dressed – grey skirt, blue top, cardigan, fur-lined boots – and wears some make-up. Mid-fifties, at a guess.

  She’s been dead a while: body flaccid, no lividity. But the smell is the strongest indicator. This kitchen feels no more than ten or twelve degrees now, and it’s the middle of the day. Decomposition doesn’t happen fast at these low temperatures, but it’s already extensive. The smell isn’t even just a smell. It has a more physical presence than that. A scent that climbs into your nostrils, occupies your sinuses. It’s like a ball of cotton wool, dense and damp, that makes breathing difficult.

  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 agonising. Like an African famine repainted in Welsh colours.

 
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 catfood, 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, SOCOs from Swansea, the divisional surgeon from Cardiff. 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.