The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

  Brattenbury told me: ‘As far as you can, Fiona, just relax. We’ve done this before. We’re not expecting armed resistance. And in any case, we will move in with overwhelming force.’

  I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘They may seek to intimidate or threaten you. They may wish to remind you of Sajid Kureishi and what happens to those who cross them. But you have nothing to fear. They need your expertise. This is the endgame now.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Remember that these people are highly security conscious, so please don’t be concerned if they take precautions.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Precautions. Being stripped. An intimate skin, hair and cavity search. A change of clothes. Eye-mask. Hood. A switch of cars. Rock music. Please don’t be concerned.

  I’m not concerned.

  Not concerned, that is, until after some hours have, I guess, passed. Enough hours, easily, to get us to Heathrow. We left Pontcanna at half past two, so it must be after six now, perhaps well after.

  Then the going changes abruptly. A couple of steep ascents. Hard bends in the road. A left turn onto a rough surface. Too rough for tarmac, no matter how potholed. A country track. Unmetalled. At one point Henderson misjudges something and the car bottom scrapes on something hard. In a gap between tracks, I hear Henderson swear softly. Quintrell starts to say something, but Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics starts to tell me, yet again, about laying back, head on the grass, and I can’t hear anything more.

  The car stops.

  Doors bang open and closed. Henderson removes the headphones from me and says, ‘We’re here. Are you OK?’

  ‘Do I have to listen to any more Stereophonics?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’m OK.’

  The noise and the sightlessness has disoriented me. I can feel my voice is clumsy. Not my own.

  Henderson tells me that he’s going to lead me inside. It’s not just my voice which is clumsy. It’s my movements too. I clamber out OK, but have pins and needles in my thigh and ask to lean against the car, waiting for feeling to return.

  As we stand there, a fox yelps somewhere in the silence. A bird breaks cover from a tree. I hear its heavy flapping overhead. There is no engine noise, no jets.

  Either Heathrow has decided to close its flightpaths down for the day or we aren’t within a hundred miles of the place and Adrian Brattenbury has no idea where I am.

  Please don’t be concerned.

  Then, when I’m ready, Henderson takes me by an arm and leads me over to a door. We go inside and down a few steps. Henderson asks me to sit and I lower myself gingerly on what turns out to be a soft surface, a sofa or bed.

  ‘Lean forward, please.’

  I lower my head. The movement bares the nape of my neck. Vertebrae forming landing lights for the executioner’s axe, the murderer’s billhook.

  No axe, no billhook.

  Henderson fiddles with the pullcord, catches my hair, apologises, undoes the knot. Removes hood and eye-mask.

  There’s way too much light around me and I immediately close my eyes. Henderson rubs the top of my back. ‘OK, take your time. I know these things are disorienting, believe me. Just say if you want anything to eat or drink.’

  I do take my time and slowly make sense of my surroundings.

  I’m in a small white-painted room, no phone, no windows. There’s a bed, on which I’m now sitting, a bedside table, a lamp, a chest of drawers, a small sink. There’s a glass vase containing daffodils by the bed. I touch them: they’re real, not fake. The bed has clean linen, a set of folded towels, a bathrobe. On the chest of drawers, there is a packet of clean underwear, a couple of T-shirts, socks. Also a toothbrush, toothpaste, two bars of that tiny paper-wrapped hotel soap, and some pale green shampoo in a clear plastic bottle.

  I stand up, move around, recover my senses. The T-shirts are in XS, my size. I open the shampoo and sniff. It smells of apple.

  ‘Apple,’ I say.

  Henderson watches me reorder myself. Says, ‘This is your room. Anna will be staying just next to you.’ He taps the wall. ‘The accommodation here is fairly basic, but if there’s anything you want or need, please ask and we will try to provide it. Toilet and shower room here.’ He leads me upstairs. ‘Exercise room. More bedrooms through there. Common room here.’

  The ‘common room’ is painted white, beige carpet. Chairs and sofas. A TV screen. Some books and magazines. A little kitchenette with tea and coffee things, a little sink. Bottles of water. A wicker basket that contains small plastic packets of biscuits. There are more flowers here. More daffs. No windows.

  At the head of the little flight of steps, commanding the front door, there’s a man in an old flannel shirt and a leather jacket. He is reading the Sun. He is developing a slight paunch, but is otherwise muscled and tough-looking. On a little table beside him, he has a cup of tea, some lo-cal sweeteners, two chocolate digestives, and a pistol.

  I don’t know much about guns, but I think this is a Glock, a standard police weapon.

  I don’t know much about lo-cal sweeteners, but I do know they’re less effective when taken with chocolate digestives.

  ‘This is Geoff,’ says Henderson. ‘He’s here to look after us.’

  Geoff waves a hand. Quintrell – who’s changed into a knee-length black dress – exits her room, trots upstairs, and goes through a big wooden door, which leads I don’t know where.

  Something clicks. Back at her house, when I was getting ready to strip, I was struck by her clothes. Jeans and a jumper. Not the sort of thing that a woman like Quintrell would have worn to a big business meeting in a Heathrow hotel. She’s attached to her own self-image as a professional woman. She’d have worn a skirt or a dress. Heels. A trouser suit at the very minimum. Quintrell’s initial outfit tells me that we’re in proper countryside. Not some golf-club-’n’-country-club version of the countryside either, but the real thing. A place with farm animals, ditches, bad tracks and muck.

  We will move in with overwhelming force, Brattenbury promised me, but he probably didn’t know how easy a promise it would be to keep. How much force do you need to overwhelm an empty conference room? How many men needed to arrest a room full of absences?

  Please don’t be concerned.

  ‘Am I in prison?’ I ask, which isn’t a very eloquent way to phrase the question, but is the way it comes out.

  ‘The meeting rooms are through here,’ says Henderson. ‘Your presence there will be required off and on over the next few days. Meals will be served either there or in the common room. You’ll find that the windows are all shuttered. I request that you do not make any attempt to look out of them. Also that you do not go outside. Is that clear?’

  ‘You mean “yes”. That’s the answer to my question.’

  ‘The answer to your question is “no”. You will be here for a few days, then we will return you to Cardiff. While you are here, we ask you to respect a few rules. That’s all.’

  He asks if I want anything. I say I want to shower, then eat. He tells me that Geoff will sort me out. He’s impatient to get away. I can hear voices and footfall from the door that Quintrell went through. The occasional burst of noisy laughter. Henderson has not been unkind particularly, but my claims on his patience are expiring fast.

  I let him go.

  I ask Geoff about food. He produces a menu. Scrambled egg. Ditto, with bacon, sausage and tomato. A range of sandwiches. Soup of the day.

  ‘Soup of the day?’ I say. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘Soup today was parsnip. Didn’t taste of much, I don’t think. They do a good sandwich though. They do chips too, if you want them.’

  I ask for a sandwich, some salad, no chips. He calls someone with my order. An intercom thing, not an external line. There are no external lines here that I’ve seen. No mobile phones either. ‘Give it twenty minutes,’ he advises. ‘They’ve got their hands full at the moment.’

  I get a towel from my bed and go to
the shower room.

  After a few hours with my head in that hood, my breath hanging wet and foggy around my cheeks, I feel clammy and unclean. I spend ten minutes under the shower. A blast of warm water and soap. Wash my hair and dry it with one of those built-in dryers that hotels have.

  Stare at myself in the mirror.

  Fiona Grey, looking vaguely sporty in her pale grey trackies and white T-shirt. Hair longer than I’m used to. A face that means nothing to me, or nothing I can read anyway.

  We look at each other through the glass for a while, then grow bored.

  I go off to find Geoff.

  Ask if he has a ciggy. He says no, and the common room is no smoking. But he says can get me some ciggies and there’s a small room where I can smoke.

  Ask if there’s any chance of getting some weed. He laughs and says, ‘Doubt it.’

  I say, ‘What time is it?’

  He checks his watch – not disguising the dial – and says coming up to nine o’clock. That’s more than six hours after we left Quintrell’s house. Enough time to have gone pretty much anywhere in England or Wales. Time enough to reach southern Scotland.

  Geoff says, ‘It’s weird, isn’t it, not knowing the time. Gets you disoriented.’

  He also says, dropping his voice, ‘And just so you know, I’m Special Branch. Here to keep an eye on you. Any problems, I’m on it.’

  I don’t say much to that. My sandwich comes. There’s a knock at the door, Geoff enters a passcode to open it, deals with whoever’s at the door. The food arrives on a tray that someone’s nicked from McDonald’s. It’s a ‘club’ sandwich, which turns out to mean chicken, bacon and some bits of salad.

  I eat. Drink some water. Read about speech therapy.

  Then Geoff goes off for a pee, taking his Glock with him when he goes. I lope out of the common room, through the doors that Quintrell and Henderson both used.

  Emerge into a large, converted barn. Stone walls, partially exposed. Huge timber beams. A fancy wooden atrium, double doors beyond, shading the noise of a dozen or more voices. I open the door. A sudden loudening of the conversation. Some Indian faces. White ones. A couple of waitresses, dressed in black, holding trays, but also standing close to each other. Village girls, I guess. Not pros. Close to each other, because they’re not used to this kind of thing and are buddying up for mutual support.

  No one really notices my entry, except the waitresses. One of them offers me a drink, the other a tray of canapés. I ignore the canapés, take a glass of red wine.

  Quintrell is close to me, but is standing with her back to me, talking to an Indian guy in a suit. Henderson is the far side of the room, side on to me. I don’t really notice the room itself. Just have an impression of it. One impressive stone wall. A big fireplace with a log fire crackling away. Copper wall lamps, expensive-looking. A couple of big timber pillars, supporting a gallery. Raw oak. Everything fancy.

  I push through the people to Henderson. I don’t think he sees me, as such, just sees movement in his peripheral vision, turns to check it. He’s wearing a dark suit, white shirt, silk tie.

  ‘Fiona,’ he says, or starts to say.

  Might have said more, except that by this time I’ve thrown my red wine in his face. My glass too.

  Leaped at him.

  Kicking. Hitting. Scratching. Biting.

  This isn’t fighting the way my friend Lev taught me. There’s no science in this, no carefully gauged aggression. This is strictly playground stuff. Fiona Grey keeps her nails fairly long, and I feel them drag down Henderson’s cheek. Feel her fist knot in his thinning hair.

  I’m shouting too. She is, or I am. I don’t know. We’re not always so separate. A stream of swearwords mostly. Nothing very inventive. ‘You stupid fucking buggering shit-wanker.’ That sort of thing.

  Henderson doesn’t resist much. That is: he protects himself from my assault but doesn’t seek to harm me back. Any billhook action is strictly off limits. But this fight is eighteen-to-one, and I’m the one.

  My left arm is yanked from behind. Yanked and twisted. My right arm is also seized. A forearm closes over my throat and darkness instantly starts to overtake me.

  I’m aware that my legs are thrashing. Kicking out at anything I can reach. But my shoes are soft and can’t do much damage. In any case, my legs too are pinioned. Geoff materialises beside me. Passes his pistol to Henderson, who holds it loosely. Geoff cuffs my wrists behind my back. Someone forces me down into a chair. The person who was choking me removes their hold and light starts to return to my world.

  A world of confusion.

  Henderson is dabbing his cheeks with a paper napkin. Has wine everywhere. But there’s blood on him as well as wine, and I realise that a fair bit of the blood is mine. I think I cut myself on the wine glass somehow. In any case, I’ve got a gash on my knees and a graze all down my forearm. My joints scream from their various pummellings.

  The confusion isn’t merely physical. There’s a ripple of social confusion too. It’s not every cocktail party which is enlivened by unexpected assault, and at first people aren’t sure how to react. I’m fairly sure that while I was being choked someone swiped me hard across the face. A backhand slap that seemed to loosen the teeth in my mouth. But I can also see that my actions have provoked amusement. Henderson is too suave to be your classic bruiser, but he knows how to handle himself and he was never at great physical risk from a girl who takes her T-shirts in size XS. A couple of the Indians are laughing openly at me and speaking to each other in some language other than English. There’s a circle of faces, checking that Henderson is OK, rebuking me in different accents, and laughing.

  One of the waitresses tiptoes into the circle. Starts mopping up wine and broken glass with kitchen towel and a plastic dustpan. She doesn’t catch my eye. When her efforts to clean up start flicking round my feet, someone drags my chair backwards and me with it.

  I say, sulkily, through a swelling lip, ‘We’re all fucked. You know that? That guy there’ – I’m nodding at Geoff – ‘he’s a pig. Special Branch. You think you’re all so clever with the strip searches and bollocks, and you let a fucking copper right into your stupid fucking meeting.’

  There’s more. I say more. But I don’t really know what. Fiona Grey doesn’t cry any more than I do, but she’s distraught. As far as she sees the world, everything’s just turned to shit. Instead of speech therapy, New Zealand, and a pocketful of cash, she’s looking at a prison sentence, investigation by the Manchester police, and no chance of ever emigrating.

  As I speak, more to myself than anyone else, hair falling in front of my face, I become aware of Henderson’s voice saying, ‘Fiona. Fiona.’

  I don’t respond, or not properly. Just kick out, catch his shin, swear some more.

  So he slaps me. Hard.

  Hard enough I’m half thrown from my chair. I might even fall, except that someone has my handcuffed wrists in their grip and their hold steadies me.

  This time I feel blood in my mouth and there’s enough force in the blow that I don’t want another.

  I just mumble, ‘Fuck off,’ and try to turn away.

  But Henderson’s not for turning. Staying clear of my legs, he tells me that Geoff is not Special Branch. That he’s assigned to tell all newcomers the same thing. That it’s a test of loyalty. That I should have calmly reported the comment to him, Henderson, at the next opportunity. That instead, I have caused an unnecessary drama and, he manages to indicate, a good bit of damage to a decent suit.

  He says these things with a quiet, emphatic force. As though telling me these things were a slightly less flavoursome version of hitting me.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m telling you? Geoff, will you please tell Fiona that you are not a policeman working undercover.’

  Geoff does as he’s asked, and other people weigh in too. The consensus in the room is that I overreacted wildly. That I somehow owe an apology to them all for interrupting their precious party. For damaging something
as beautiful and valuable as Vic Henderson’s Italian grey suit.

  At the same time, as it becomes clearer that I am not a threat, that no one has been hurt, that this whole thing has been the most temporary of tempests, I become the very best form of party entertainment: a thing of merriment. A person that everyone can ridicule without breaching etiquette. One of the Indian guys is re-enacting my assault, with explosions of laughter from those around him. Quintrell’s face is a study of dislike and contempt.

  And then – it’s all over. Geoff releases me from my handcuffs. A waitress brings kitchen towel for me to wipe at. Henderson and I shake hands. Someone gives me a glass of white wine, which I neither drink nor use as a weapon.

  One of the waitresses offers me a canapé.

  I say, ‘Is there any blood on my face?’

  She says, ‘A bit,’ and helps me wipe it off. I say I made a bit of a fool of myself. She tells me not to worry, no harm done. I ask her for a packet of cigarettes and she’ll say she’ll see what she can do.

  Her accent is Welsh, for sure, but not Cardiff, and not North Wales. The accent of the Valleys is a bit different from the accents you hear further into Wales, Powys and Ceredigion, and I think her accent isn’t Valleys, but I wouldn’t swear to it. We don’t talk for all that long.

  I try standing up, but feel wobbly, so sit back down.

  I’m in sports shoes, T-shirt and trackie bottoms. The men here – and it’s mostly men – are, apart from Geoff, all in suits and ties. Quintrell is in black dress and clicky heels. Also she doesn’t have blood, wine and glass all over her clothes.

  Henderson goes off to change. When he returns, he introduces me to a man who calls himself Ramesh.

  ‘Ram is leading the software side of things,’ Henderson says. ‘He’s going to need your operational knowledge to make sure we get a really robust system. Garbage in, garbage out, right, Ram?’

  Ramesh shakes my hand and laughs at me some more. I think the laughter is meant to be jovial and inclusive, but it doesn’t feel that way.