The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

  Makes a short speech. Schmaltzy down to the last cliché, but so earnestly delivered that my heart can’t help but be moved. He ends down on one knee, saying, ‘Fi, will you marry me?’

  I say, ‘Yes.’

  The diamond is a solitaire and Buzz has chosen a ring that fits perfectly.

  Nothing feels real.

  14

  It’s five days before Christmas and my last night in Cardiff, or my last as Fiona Griffiths.

  We’ve had – my mam, dad, two sisters and me – an early Christmas. The full works. Turkey, roast potatoes, bread sauce, stuffing, bacon rolls, Brussels, carrots, gravy, redcurrant jelly. All that, plus present-giving by the tree, carols on the sound system, crackers and paper hats, and all those endless waves of further food: Christmas pudding, trifle, fruit, nuts, chocolate, mince pies. Assault troops storming an already exhausted digestive system.

  I surrender before finishing my first helping of turkey.

  Dad’s giving most of us electronics this year. An iPad for me. An upgraded smartphone for Kay. The same but different for Ant. Mam – who never learned how to programme her video recorder, who only ever taped programmes by waiting, live, for them to start, then holding the control at arm’s length and stabbing at its buttons with a look approaching terror on her face – Mam gets a day out to a fancy spa and a machine which describes itself as a 6 in 1 Ultrasonic Liposuction Vacuum Cavitation Multipolar All-Bio Natureworld Slimming Device. Mam looks baffled and thrilled in about equal measure. Kay, envious, asks if she can use it.

  Dad tries to get us all to watch The Sound of Music in the living room, but Kay and Ant want to go and play with their toys, and Mam wants to start washing up and ‘get a few things ready for supper’.

  Dad looks at me and says, ‘Come on then, Fi, love.’

  We go through to his studio, a place semi-detached from the main house and a place that is entirely Dad’s. His mess, his toys, his energy.

  He shows me some of his newest acquisitions. His latest thing is 1920s-themed American diners. He has an autographed photo of Al Capone. Some stamped tin sheets which will form the ceiling of his next bar. Some Tiffany-style light fittings.

  Dad doesn’t have taste, exactly. He acquires the hideous and the beautiful with the same awed reverence. What he does have, however, is a collector’s appetite. That satelessness. So he doesn’t stop buying stuff just because he has enough. He buys because the stuff is there, available. Dad still seems like a five-year-old in a sweet shop: amazed wonder that the world has so many good things in it. His bars and clubs succeed, I think, because they give to the customer that sense of the prolific. A gift of abundance.

  Dad is slow to settle.

  ‘Lord, your mother does feed us,’ he complains, pouring glasses of fizzy water for us both.

  ‘Thanks for my iPad,’ I say. ‘And the money.’

  Dad had put £2,500 in cash in an envelope with my card.

  ‘Oh, you’re welcome, love. You’ll need it in Sarajevo.’

  Sarajevo: where I’ve told my family I’ll be for Christmas. Working with Balkan law enforcement agencies. Only Dad doesn’t say the word like that. He puts inverted commas round it. A smile nibbling at the foundations.

  I shrug. Not confirming, not denying.

  ‘See, if I had a cynical mind, I’d say that maybe you’re not quite telling the whole truth about things. I mean, I’m sure you have a good reason, love, I’m not having a go. Just – well, they have phones in that part of the world these days. And flights home. And a little part of me says that if you were spending six months helping Albanian ladies, or whatever, you’d still be calling home and seeing us for weekends now and again.’

  I smile. ‘But if I weren’t going to Sarajevo, I probably couldn’t tell you where I was going.’

  ‘No, that’s true.’

  ‘Dad.’ I sit forward. We’re on facing leather chesterfields. There’s a coal-effect gas fire flickering on our left. Picture windows, black against the night, behind Dad. ‘Your clubs and your bars, they’re legitimate businesses, I know that. Maybe there are little fiddles in there – I don’t know, tax things, employment things, whatever – but they’re basically straight. What I don’t know, what I don’t really know, is whether any of your former business interests are still active.’

  ‘No. I’ve given up on all that.’

  Dad’s answer doesn’t come immediately. And it comes out as a rumble, low in the throat. It’s as though he hadn’t used his voice for years. Was trying it out again, like a frock coat being shaken out. A chimney pipe swept free of soot.

  ‘And I don’t know, don’t really know, if any of your friends are still playing the old tables, dancing to the old tunes.’

  Dad’s head goes back at that. Beyond the gaze of the shaded lamplight. The gas fire paints his features in dim shades of flame and copper.

  ‘Lord, love, I have so many friends . . .’

  ‘Of course.’ Dad knows everyone and everyone he knows is a friend. ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant the people you were closest to. Uncle Em, people like that.’

  ‘We’re old men now. And those were young men’s games.’

  If this were a police interview, I’d want something more specific than that, but I’m not an interrogator and this isn’t a suspect.

  I can still hear, from across the little patio that separates this studio from the main house, the faint lilt of Christmas carols. They are a thousand miles away, audible only intermittently, like those undependable freaks of shortwave radio.

  ‘Dad, I’m going to ask you a question. If you answer it with a “yes”, I’ll drop my current assignment. I won’t give a reason. I won’t have to give one. I’ll just go about my ordinary business, the way I did before. I won’t impede any current police investigations, but I won’t assist them either.’

  Dad nods, inviting the question. I think his lips move – a ‘Lord, Fi, love,’ most likely, or something along those lines – but no actual sound emerges. I wait just a second or two longer, trying to read this silence. Trying, vainly, to read the shadows in his face.

  Then, ‘Do you, or do people close to you, have anything to do with a man called Sajid “Saj” Kureishi? Or the death of a woman called Hayley Morgan? Or with a fraud that has affected a number of local companies?’ I name them all, the companies which have lost money.

  Dad assembles his features in the shadowlands, then brings his face forward into the light.

  ‘That’s three questions. At least.’

  ‘And that’s not an answer to any of them.’

  Again that throat rumble. Frock coats and chimney pipes.

  ‘No, love. I’ve nothing to do with any of that. Like I told you, I’m straighter than straight these days.’

  That wasn’t, in fact, what Dad said. He told me that he was no longer involved in his old games – primarily the purchase and resale of stolen cars – but avoided any statement about his current operations.

  But still. I asked my question, got my answer.

  I say, ‘I’m not going to Sarajevo. I’m going to be working undercover. It’ll be a longish assignment. I don’t really know how long.’

  ‘It’ll be hard for your mother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And dangerous, I suppose. How did Hayley Morgan die?’

  ‘She was starving. Ended up eating rat poison. Saj Kureishi was taped to a chair and had his hands hacked off. He bled to death.’

  ‘Bloody hell, love! You don’t give yourself an easy life, do you?’

  I half smile at that. You could say the same of my pa. Lads from the old Tiger Bay, where Dad came from, were meant to work on the docks, indulge in petty crime or, if they were smart and ambitious, get a place at a grammar school and work their way into a white-collar job in the port authority or local government. He chose none of those options.

  ‘I might need help along the way. If I do, Mam mustn’t know. Buzz mustn’t know. It would be just me and you.’

  Dad
nods, relaxes. This is an easy one for him. If I ask for help, he’ll give it. He always has done, always will.

  ‘Of course, love. Whatever you need.’

  It’s the first answer he’s given me which I believe completely.

  15

  Four thirty p.m. on Christmas Eve.

  I have a black bag with my stuff in it. Eighteen pounds in cash. I avoided sleeping much last night, so I look pretty rough. I haven’t washed my hair for four days and I usually need to wash it daily.

  I have the name of a homeless hostel that’s not too far away. Make my way there. The streets heave with the last thrashing of a city centre Christmas. Men getting tanked up in the pub before going home to face their families. Everything green and red and gold. Everything that can be made to twinkle twinkling like fury.

  The hostel is full.

  I don’t know what to do. It’s the one Brattenbury told me to go to. I think maybe he knew it would be full. The man at the reception desk tells me to sit down and gives me a cup of tea. I drink it slowly as he phones around. Finds a place that has space. He gives me a map and explains carefully, twice, how to get there. I say thanks. He asks me if I’ve eaten. I shrug and say, ‘sort of’. He asks if I’ve got any money, and I say, ‘I’m fine.’

  Finish my tea. Walk over to the other hostel. A big white building. Those boxy modern windows that look efficient, but somehow inhuman, as if belonging to a posh sort of jail. There’s a little patch of lawn in front, pitted with black because of the season. The back and side of the hostel are protected by fiercely spiked steel-grey railings.

  I find the entrance. Two men outside. Raggedy-bearded. Sharing a roll-up cigarette.

  ‘All right?’ one of the men says.

  I duck the question and go inside. The man who asked the question holds the door for me, as I find it hard to manage with my bag.

  There’s another reception desk here. Also rows of leaflets, noticeboards, chirpily phrased ads for therapy groups and back-to-work initiatives.

  I say, ‘I’m Fiona. I think someone called about me.’

  The woman on duty – plump, black T-shirt worn under a patterned Christmas cardigan, and a face that is both tough and loving – says, ‘Fiona, yes. Fiona Grey, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She tells me her name: Abs, short for Abigail. She gives me forms to fill in. I can’t fill them all out. Partly because I don’t want that level of intrusion into my notional past. Mostly because Fiona Grey wouldn’t want to.

  I fill in the main bits and wave my pen over the remaining blank areas. ‘I’m not going to stay long,’ I say.

  ‘Do you have a place to go to?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Friends or family?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Have you got anything lined up with the council? Put in an application form for housing?’

  I tell her no, but say they have to house me because I’m from the area.

  She grimaces, tells me it doesn’t work quite like that. Asks me what money I have. I say ‘twenty quid’ and show her what I have.

  ‘OK, we’re going to have to do this properly, but maybe not on Christmas Eve, eh, Fiona fach? Do you have towels?’

  I shake my head.

  She books me in for three days. Charges me £1.00 for the towels, refundable if I return them clean. Twenty pence for a sachet of shampoo.

  She takes me up to a room. Two bunkbeds, two other women already sharing. Everything very clean. Lockers on the landing where I can keep my cash and papers.

  ‘No smoking anywhere in the building. You need to read and sign our policy on aggression, drugs and alcohol. We operate a no-tolerance policy and we do mean no tolerance. Showers down the hall there. Breakfast at eight. Christmas lunch at twelve. It’s 50p for breakfast, £1.50 for the lunch, but you won’t want to miss that.’

  I say thanks. Drop my bag.

  The other two women are called Sophie and Mared. I say who I am, but we don’t talk much. They’re both alcoholic, I think. There’s something brightly unstable about them anyway.

  I take a shower. Wash my hair. Put on clothes from my bag. Dark jeans. Black boots. T-shirt, dark jumper and jacket. Wash my old underwear and T-shirt in the sink, take them back to my room to hang out.

  Mared says, ‘There’s a laundry room, you know.’

  I say, ‘oh,’ but hang my clothes out just the same.

  I quite like the hostel. Christmas lunch – everything overcooked, but big portions, warm and lots of gravy – is crowded, smelly and companionable. I sit next to a man who spends the entire time telling me about his past as a butcher. He doesn’t ask a single question about me, or not really. I eat everything, then fall asleep in the TV room.

  On Boxing Day, Abs sits me down and goes through my history. I say I was in a relationship in Manchester. Say that it didn’t work out.

  ‘Was there physical violence? Did he hit you?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Did you report it to the police?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Do you have children? Are there any children involved?’

  Shake.

  ‘OK. Are you sure?’

  I nod. ‘I don’t have kids.’

  She goes through other things. My connection with Cardiff. My existing family. My job history. Any skills I have.

  I say, ‘I’ve always worked.’

  ‘OK, good. That’s good.’

  Abs digs it all out of me. I’m a cleaner now. Used to do clerical work. Filing, admin. Payroll. ‘I’ve got qualifications.’

  Abs wants to know more. I tell her I got all my payroll certificates.

  ‘Do you still have them?’

  ‘No.’

  Abs wants me to make a Reintegration Plan with her. I don’t do it that day, or the next. But before New Year’s Eve is breaking out in the city centre like a small war, I have a draft Plan. Its gist: get a job, get accommodation, get a life. Don’t live with someone who hits me. Abs says, ‘You can do this, you know. Anyone can end up here as a one-off thing. That’s just bad luck. The trick is not to end up here again.’ I say thank you, and she hugs me.

  16

  I get a job. Cleaning again. Minimum wage. Start at five, work through to two o’clock. Offices and other commercial property.

  I like it, like everything about it. I like the early starts. I like the routine and the pressure. I become quite good at it, definitely one of the better cleaners. I’m still a bit forgetful, especially in the big open plan offices, but I enjoy doing the floors and I’m ace on bathrooms and toilets. I like the sparkle from a properly cleaned mirror and the gleam from a row of clean white ceramic loos. I also like the invisibility. The way no one notices you when you clean around them. People might slightly lower their voices when they speak to each other in my presence, but not much. I’ve become like one of those minor modern inconveniences: a swipe-card entry system or a telephone menu. Something that irritates briefly and is then ignored. My best friend is a Filipina, Juvy Barretto. She has six teeth and bad English, but we smile a lot. She helps me with the big offices, telling me what to do when I get confused. I help her with the bathrooms, where she doesn’t move as fast as I do.

  So I mop, I clean, I dust, I hoover. I’m seldom late. I never complain. I don’t pick stupid fights with anyone. I’m issued with a new tabard – smart, polyester, navy blue – and I take good care of it. Wash it. Iron it. Keep it nice.

  I make sandwiches at the hostel and eat them for lunch. Abs has got me a single room to myself – tiny, but I don’t mind that.

  And she’s got big plans for me, Abs has. She wants me to get my own place. I’m not on any kind of priority housing list because I’m single, no kids, no health issues and no recent connection with the area. On the other hand, I’m earning good money now. After deductions, I’m making £189 a week. I have to pay £28 to the hostel – quite a lot, but I’m in work – and then meals and transport costs another £55. I try to avoid expensive stuff, meat espe
cially, and walk as much as I can, but there are limits.

  In any case, I’m making money and I start looking for properties to rent. Find a place on the A470 North Road, just by the intersection with Western Avenue. It’s a studio flat. All-in-one bedroom, living room, kitchenette. Shared bathroom down the hall. The bed is a single with a lumpy mattress. The living room part of the set-up consists of a giant brown velour armchair, a Formica table and two folding metal chairs. The kitchenette comprises a tiny sink, a two-ring hob and a microwave. There’s a big brown wardrobe of the sort that grandmothers used to keep in order to give small children nightmares. It smells of mothballs and something else, I’m not sure what. I’m on the second floor and my window looks out onto no fewer than nine lanes of traffic. The A470 itself, plus slip roads leading on and off the main ramp. There are always lights, always noise, always traffic.

  I like almost everything about it. I like the roads outside, their neon brightness. I like the way there isn’t too much of anything: one room, one bed, one armchair, one table, one sink. I like the smallness, especially. If I sit in my giant velour armchair, I can touch the bed with my right arm and, almost, the little kitchen range with my left. It’s harder for me to get lost, physically or metaphorically.

  Because the only address I can give is a homeless shelter – I’m not even DSS – my potential landlord wants two and a half months’ deposit from me upfront. That’s a lot more than I can afford, but Abs helps me take out a loan from a social housing fund. The loan doesn’t just cover the deposit, but also things like bedding. When I get the money and sign my rental agreement, she’s genuinely thrilled for me. I’m thrilled for myself, actually. Proud. She tells me about a Freecycle place which helps people starting out or, like me, restarting. I get as much as I can for free. A nice man drives the stuff over to my place in his lunch break. I try to give him two pounds, but he tells me not to worry. He calls me ‘love’.

  Abs makes me promise to come in for weekly counselling and ‘life planning sessions’. She wants to get me out of the minimum wage cleaning racket and into the sunny uplands of payroll clerking. She’s checked with the Institute of Payroll Professionals and found that they have a log of my payroll certificates: a log which shows the extent of SOCA’s always confident reach. Abs gives me reprints of my past glories.