The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths)

by Harry Bingham

  One of my picks has, I’m sure, caught one of the pins. But catching is nothing. Turning is all. I apply increasing force to the pick until the damn thing suddenly breaks free in my hand. The pick itself is broken off inside the lock. I can’t winkle it out with my fingers. Can’t even get a proper hold of the end.

  Sod it.

  Big sod it, in fact.

  Geoff is laid out cold, but he’ll come to at some point and will do so knowing that it was me who hit him. And I’m in a stone-built prison with a door I can’t open and locks on every window.

  I don’t know where Henderson or Allan are – or how many highly armed buddies they may have outside – but I do know that this is not now a safe place to be.

  I get Geoff’s Coke. Pour out what he hasn’t drunk. Find some scissors in the stationery cupboard and snip out the top of the can. Then the bottom. Then cut straight down the side, so I have a flat metal rectangle.

  Thus far, I’m sure of myself. I’m a bit vaguer about the next bit, but I cut away at the bottom half of the rectangle until I have something that looks like a well-manicured fingernail, pointing down.

  Fold over the top of the rectangle to give myself something to work with.

  Take my tool into the conference room which has two big windows, shuttered and padlocked.

  The manicured fingernail is my best effort at a padlock shim, a little slip of metal that can slip over the shaft of a padlock to release its mechanism.

  But I’ve cut my shim too thick. Can’t get the fingernail to fold over the shaft.

  Snip away at the metal. Reduce its width.

  Try again.

  This time the metal fingernail slips down all the way. Only the collar, the top half of the rectangle, remains proud of the shaft. I pull the collar round in a circle, keeping it tight. Down and turn. That’s the action. I know it in theory, but haven’t done this in practice, or not for years anyway. There are YouTube videos which remind you what to do, but there’s no internet in here. No phones.

  I push down and turn. Nothing breaks, but nothing happens.

  Damn it. This is starting not to feel like fun.

  Then, a gesture of annoyance as much as anything, I test the padlock. As I should have done immediately. Because the mechanism has been released. The shank pulls free of the body. A half-inch of empty space, promising freedom.

  You beauty, I think. You little beauty.

  Open the shutters. Open the windows. Gun in my hand. Climb out.

  There’s wind on my face. A sprinkle of late-summer rain. And Fiona Griffiths has left the building.

  52

  I head far enough from the open window that I won’t be easily identified by anyone looking out. The farmhouse is just fifty yards away. No lights on inside, but an outside lamp glows over a back door. Our barn, the one I’ve been living and working in, is part of a larger cluster of buildings, some of them converted, some just left as farm buildings.

  A sheet of corrugated iron creaks in the wind.

  Somewhere in the distance, I hear a helicopter’s choppy beat.

  Who sends a helicopter aloft at night? Air force training perhaps. Medical evacuation or mountain rescue, just possibly. But helicopters don’t often fly at night, not here on the edge of the mountains, when all that lies beneath their blades is dark country lanes and slumbering fields.

  Adrian Brattenbury, you beautiful man, I think I love you.

  Adrian Brattenbury, for all your plum-coloured jumpers and your girly fits of temper, I think I can do business with you, my friend.

  I jog over to the back door of the farmhouse, gun in hand.

  The back door has an ordinary lock. The sort a locksmith can open in twenty seconds, the sort I can get through, even fumbling, even with my enfeebled pick set, in under a minute.

  I enter, and find myself standing in a stone-flagged corridor. Stairs leading up. Doors off. An understairs cupboard, bolted top and bottom.

  I nose around. The corridor opens out into a bigger hallway. A grander front door. One half-open door leads into a large and well-equipped farmhouse kitchen. An oil-fired range cooker, but also a gas-fired hob. Knives and pans. A good stock of drink. Flour and sugar in five-kilo jars. Cooking oil in a ten-litre tin.

  It’s nice. A good space. The sort of place I’d be happy to cook in, I think, before I remember that I’m a terrible cook and have never been so master of my kitchen as when I lived in a bedsit on the North Road with a single pair of electric rings and one bradawl-battered saucepan.

  I decide to leave the cooking for another time. I take a knife, and leave.

  Roy, Roy, Roy. Where are you?

  No contest really.

  You don’t have two bolts on an understairs cupboard if all you keep there is a couple of brooms and a wash bucket.

  I go back into the kitchen. Pour some of that cooking oil onto a cloth, and use it to soak the bolts and hinges of that cupboard door. When I loose the bolts and open it, it glides noiselessly open, beckoning me silently on like the most expensive sort of servant.

  A flight of stairs, leading down.

  Cobwebby. Dark.

  There’s a light switch, though. I flip it on and a couple of wall lights come on, cheap stable-style fittings.

  I walk on down.

  The cellar is low-ceilinged. I can stand without problem, but any man would need to stoop. The place is full of the kind of rubbish that accumulates in cellars. Old apple boxes. Tables that seem too good to chuck out. Bits of machinery. Floor tiles. A stack of plastic garden chairs. A filthy window high in the wall, an old coal chute possibly.

  And Roy. Unshaven and rough-looking. A loop of heavy chain bolted to the wall. He’s lying down, on a mattress and under blankets, so I can’t see how he’s fastened. But he’s in one piece. And snoring. Snoring so loudly, I wonder how Katie puts up with it.

  I approach the bed and kick his feet.

  He wakes up, a snore still heaving in his throat.

  ‘Morning, Sarge.’

  ‘Fuck! Fiona!’

  Neither of us are quite in ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’ territory, but we can work on the transcript later.

  ‘I thought maybe you might like to piss off out of here.’

  He pulls his blankets away. He’s manacled at the wrists and waist. And badly beaten. Legs lying at a bad angle.

  The padlocks I can possibly deal with, the injuries I certainly can’t.

  ‘I tried to escape three days ago. They gave me a kicking and broke both legs.’

  Roy explains this with a touching simplicity, as though describing a clever bit of play in rugby. Now that I see his face more clearly, I see that he’s not just looking rough, he’s looking injured. In pain.

  My plan, such as it was, starts to collapse. ‘You can’t walk? I’ve brought lock picks.’

  ‘I can crawl.’

  If that’s what it has to be, it’s what it has to be.

  I start work on the smallest of the padlocks. First with my shim – which isn’t even close to being strong enough – then with my picks. Get nowhere. These are big locks, agricultural things, and my picks are designed for ordinary household doors.

  I’m getting nowhere.

  Roy looks at my tools bending in the lock and says, ‘Fiona, get out, get help, come back.’

  I nod. Not much else to do.

  ‘You better have this.’

  I offer him my Glock.

  Roy shakes his head. ‘There’s a gun room somewhere. I’ve heard them talking about it. When I tried to escape, they came after me with shotguns and rifles. I didn’t make it more than thirty yards.’

  I nod. ‘OK.’

  Disappear back upstairs.

  No sound from the slumbering house. Just a tick of water somewhere. Guttering loosely jointed. That and the sigh of wind.

  Of course a house like this has a gun room. Rabbits and foxes. The occasional escaping copper. And you wouldn’t keep weapons upstairs. They’re strictly ground-floor items. And not at th
e front of the house. Somewhere close to the back door. Opposite the steps to the cellar there’s another door. A boot room. Boots and waxed jackets. A washing machine and dryer. Beyond that, a further door. Glass cabinets and guns. Shotguns. Rifles. Handguns. Shells and bullets.

  The cabinets are all locked, but the keys sit in a little pottery bowl on the window sill.

  You don’t need much conventional security when you’ve got Henderson and his buddies on the prowl. They’re better security than keys.

  I take a rifle and shotgun for Roy, a shotgun for me. Plenty of ammo. Trot downstairs and get Roy tooled up. He looks better that way: sitting up and with an armful of guns.

  ‘Fucking hell, Fi. You’re something else, you really are.’

  That sentence seems logically weak to me, but I’m not going to quarrel.

  ‘I told Katie I’d get you out. So here I am: getting you out.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I appreciate it.’

  ‘DCI Jackson once told me that you’re not allowed to just shoot the fuckers. You have to say “Police” first. Then you can shoot them.’

  ‘OK. Good to know.’

  I go to leave, but Roy calls me back with a low whisper.

  ‘Fi, if I don’t make it for any reason, tell Katie—’

  ‘I saw Katie. She told me to tell you that she loves you and always will. And that your daughter loves you and always will. And she cried when she said it. And she looked more beautiful than ever. And when she said it, she meant it with every bone in her body. And if you want to say anything to her in return, you can bloody well tell her yourself.’

  ‘All right. I will.’ He has tears in his eyes, a catch in his throat. He’s a lucky man.

  ‘Roy, I’m going to make a bit of a mess. When stuff goes off, you might want to break that window.’ I point at the coal-chute window. ‘You’ll want the air.’

  The stack of roof tiles is within his reach. I’m not sure I’d be much good at breaking a window with them, not while lying down, but I’m sure Roy will do fine.

  I realise we need some sort of parting gesture. Don’t know why, but it’s what the moment calls for.

  I say, ‘Do men do fist-bumps? Or is that just an American thing?’

  ‘No, we could do that.’

  We knock our fists together. His huge one. Dark tattoos circling his wrist. Tattoos and a manacle. My small fist. I’m still wearing Jessica’s bracelets and even though Roy hits me gently, I can still feel the power in that arm. I don’t know what he finds in mine.

  I lope upstairs. Bolt Roy in again. Load my shotgun in the light of the back door.

  In that plastery silence, limewashed and old, every click of the gun feels too loud. I probably haven’t been in the house for more than ten minutes, but it feels too long.

  Entering the kitchen, I move stuff around until I find a pair of red propane cylinders. There’s no mains gas out here, so a gas-fired range needs the bottled stuff. I pour cooking oil round the cylinders. Sugar. A bottle of brandy. A couple of wooden chairs that are easy to move.

  I’d do a better job if I had longer, but I’m getting nervous now.

  Leave a little trail of flammable stuff leading out of the kitchen, then light it with a box of cooking matches. The long ones, designed not to burn your fingers.

  The trail was a nice idea in theory, but stupid in practice. For one thing, flame just woofs along the brandy in a single breath of fire. For another, I have to hang around in the kitchen door to make sure that I’ve got a good blaze going around the propane.

  I have.

  A smoke alarm starts to shriek.

  I run for the back door. I’ve got the shotgun in my right hand and can’t easily turn the handle with my left. Try it a couple of times, shaking, then switch hands. Roy would probably just have opened the door with a single kick.

  I run out into the darkness.

  Lights are coming on in the farmhouse upstairs. There’s an orange glow coming from the kitchen, like someone opened the wrong door and found the lick of hellfires within.

  I can still hear, or think I can, the blades of a helicopter.

  Hope you’re watching, Mr Pilot Man.

  Then the kitchen explodes. A double explosion, in fact, but so close together it sounds almost like one. A huge plume of yellow fire.

  The fire’s held within the farmhouse walls, however, and once propane is gone, it’s gone. There’s still a fire burning, but not necessarily a come-and-get-me-one, as viewed from a distant helicopter.

  I jog around looking for the oil tank. Find it. A big thing. Two and a half thousand litres, something like that. I fire into it with the Glock.

  Nothing.

  Not even the splash of oil.

  I have a spasm of anxiety, then realise that the tank might not be full and I was shooting high. Aim lower, and a plume of beautiful oil jets forth. My friend Lev once blew up an oil tank with no more than a couple of bullets. It takes me five, but I get there in the end.

  More fire.

  The human eye can, I believe, see a single candle-flame from a distance of three miles and more. The helicopter pilot will be more than three miles away, but I’m sending up a thousand odd litres of kerosene, plus a farmhouse that’s already half ablaze.

  How long before SCO19 arrive?

  Not long, I’m guessing. Ten minutes? Fifteen?

  I can’t see Roy failing to hold out that long.

  As for me, I’m not quite certain what to do next. Assuming that Henderson and friends were first alerted by the smoke alarm, it’ll take them time to figure out what’s happened and who’s behind it. What’s more, I’m well concealed by darkness. I’m no longer in immediate danger.

  So I stick around. I take precautions, of course. I move away from the farmhouse. Move into the trees, stay clear of the farm track. Keep an eye on the buildings behind me.

  A whirl of activity.

  Figures come streaming out of the farmhouse. It’s impossible to be precise about numbers, because the only light comes from my two fires and it’s hard to see anything beyond their orange hearts.

  There’s also the sound of vehicles. A van – probably the one that brought me here – reverses swiftly towards the barn. The front door opens. Someone is there – Henderson? Geoff? – ushering people out. Light spills into the yard. The gleam of wet stone, trout-brown.

  I can see Ram in his pyjamas. Another man, protesting, being almost thrown into the van. But only dark skins, dark faces.

  Wyatt doesn’t come out. Nor Terry. Nor the other Brits.

  There are gunshots from inside the barn. Not the sounds of a firefight, but the orderly sounds of execution. The pace of the shooting is considered, almost stately.

  I think Terry’s leaving party has come a day early.

  Ram and his colleagues weren’t invited, but I was. I had a question mark by my name, but I was still on the list.

  The six Indians are all out now. Inside the van. One of them, I couldn’t see which, was wearing underpants, nothing else.

  The gunshots keep coming. I try to keep my imagination pulled back from what’s happening in there, but I can’t do it. A tide of blood. Wyatt’s arrogant face. Shoesmith’s more human one. Each obliterated because the project no longer requires them. Obliterated because Henderson’s security rulebook calls for the elimination of every risk, no matter how small.

  What did I really think? That an organisation which would kill Tania Lewis for almost no reason would leave me free to live? Would leave Terry and Wyatt and the others?

  I think we’ve always underestimated Tinker. That I have. That we’ve never fully appreciated its rigour or its ruthlessness.

  But I also remember those conversations with Henderson. Those conversations about the boat. I think if I’d said yes, if I’d agreed to be his brown-legged Caribbean boat-girl, I’d have been spared the massacre. His regret was genuine. Regret not merely that we wouldn’t become lovers, but that he’d have to slaughter me with the rest. No wonde
r he gave me sad eyes.

  Even Geoff, a lesser man than Henderson, was the same. His ‘you’ve been great’ comment and that creepily lingering touch on my forearm: those were his way of saying, ‘So sorry I’m going to have to shoot you.’

  The shooting inside the barn comes to an end. The van, with its cargo of Bangalore knowhow, has already vanished, screaming down the track. I didn’t get its number plate, but this mess is no longer mine to clean up. I hope to God that SCO19 manage to pick up the van as it escapes. Still, as Brattenbury would probably tell me, ‘Fiona, we have done this before. We do know how to do this.’

  And he does. He really does. He’s never come across a Tinker before, though. I doubt if any law enforcement body has. This last year, it’s been a privilege. An honour, really. An honour and a privilege.

  As I’m thinking these thoughts, I see what I expect to see next. A glow of fire from the barn itself. The simplest way to destroy evidence. Kill everyone you don’t want to talk, then burn the place down. It’s hardly going to stop our investigation, but it’s a pretty good delaying device. The flames grow big enough, fast enough, that they must have used petrol. They presumably had cars ready for just such a contingency.

  More cars leaving the farmhouse.

  Or no, I realise, not cars, but a pair of those four-wheel-drive mud-buggies that farmers use. Crap. They’re intending to avoid roads altogether. Will Brattenbury be ready for that move? I doubt it. SCO19 will have road vehicles aplenty and no shortage of air support, but that’s not quite the same thing as having vehicles which can cross field and mountain, no matter what the conditions.

  The buggies avoid the farm track, avoid the road. There’s a gate above the farmhouse. I can just see its weather-whitened timbers gleaming like bone in the dying firelight. The two buggies make for the opening. They’re not speeding. Just moving purposefully and without a single wasted moment.

  Lower in the valley, I can see the orange glow of street lighting. The buggies are heading away from all that, into an area where there are no lights, no sodium glow.

  As I thought, we’re in the mountains, or on their very edge. The ragged line between man and mountain.