The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (DC Fiona Griffiths) Read online

  It’s gone six before I’m back at my bedsit. I’ve not seen Henderson again since the morning, but I think I did see Astra-man in the Hayes and, in any case, I’m guessing Henderson had more than himself and one other guy on the job. If they did a half-reasonable job of tracking me, they’ll have chalked me up as the world’s least suspicious recruit. A lonely young woman whose life is as empty as she says it is.

  Brattenbury has traced the Astra, of course. The car was bought for cash eight months ago. It’s registered to a false name and address, but he used ANPR data to track the car’s approximate home location, then sent plainclothes officers borrowed from the South Wales force to locate it exactly. Then had the road watched, until the man was identified: Allan Wiley, living in a small terraced house in the west of Cardiff. We don’t believe Wiley is his real name, but Brattenbury now has another home to bug, another landline to tap.

  No useful data yet, but these things take time. And another blank space in our knowledge of Tinker has been filled.

  After that Sunday, I don’t experience any further physical surveillance. I stay vigilant, but use my liberty to spend more time up at Hayley’s cottage. Long, beautiful hours of work. Long, beautiful days, with light summer rains greening the air and sheep bleating a stone’s toss from the window.

  Each time I visit, I bring fresh flowers.

  Hayley and I get along well. She likes me, I think, for all the red-faced barbarity of we living folk. Our grossness. For my part, I find Hayley’s spirit well-suited to this little house. This bona vacantia. We enjoy ourselves.

  And a fortnight after my Barbara Stanwyck Sunday, I’m going through Brattenbury’s files again, when I realise I’ve missed something. Brattenbury’s original email contained a link to a Gareth Glyn document in the National Crime Squad archives. I’d missed the link, because it hadn’t occurred to me that Glyn could have been of interest to the NCS – the successor agency to those Regional Crime Squads and the immediate predecessor of SOCA itself. I was thinking of him only as a route to my father.

  Mistake.

  I click on the link and get five lines of text on the SOCA intranet.

  Those five lines tell me that one of the intelligence services – identity redacted, but almost certainly MI5 – came to the NCS in late 2001 asking for any data they might hold on Gareth Glyn. The NCS held none and said so. End of.

  Five lines that glow like a beacon in my darkness.

  A beacon, a clue, a line of inquiry.

  The timescales are these. Gareth Glyn made his accusations of impropriety in the planning process in the mid-eighties. I was born – I guess – in early- to mid-1984. My whereabouts for the next two or two-and-a-half years are a complete mystery to me. Then, on a sunny June day in 1986, I turned up in the back of an open-top Jaguar outside Chapel. The Jaguar belonging to the man who became my father.

  Skip forward fifteen years. Gareth Glyn, in the meantime, has lost his job, has worked as a freelance consultant with ordinary, unspectacular success. He’s living with his batty, depressive wife, who might not have been quite as batty or as depressive back then. So far, so nothing. Then, in late 2001, a national intelligence agency asks the country’s senior criminal investigation agency for data on this nothing-man. A few months later, he vanishes, leaving his wife alleging murder. Her (paranoid, non-credible) list of the guilty did not include my father but did include plenty of people he knew or had dealings with or was highly likely to have known.

  As a lead, if this were a police inquiry, it would be so faint as to be almost useless.

  But this isn’t a police inquiry. It’s my inquiry. And every more ordinary lead – every allegation against him, every suspicion held by my past colleagues – has been researched diligently and found barren. That’s the negative reason for my interest. What else have I got?

  But there are more positive ones too. First, the timing is good. The Gareth Glyn affair – the original allegation, investigation and his departure from his job – the timing of all that correlates perfectly with my own strange arrival into life.

  Then too, the obliqueness is good. In a funny way, I was never going to get into my father’s past by treading the same routes that my police colleagues had already beaten into mud. My father’s defences against legal attack have proved impeccable time and again. The only way around those defences is, I’m sure, to bypass them completely. To come into his affairs at an angle so obscure, so apparently irrelevant, that it might not have occurred to him to protect against investigation. Gareth Glyn ticks that box, and then some. His wife never once mentioned my father. Nor did Glyn. It was only DCI Yorath, now retired, who made the connection, saying, in essence, that if anyone had been skimming money from construction contracts, it would have been my dad.

  And finally, whatever it was that deposited me in the back of my father’s car, it had to matter. Girls don’t simply appear out of thin air for run-of-the-mill reasons. Delia Glyn’s allegations of murder might simply be the wanderings of an unhappy woman’s mind, but a specific interest from MI5 – an interest only just pre-dating his disappearance – make it clear that something was going on. Something significant, something big.

  Big enough, perhaps, to cause a little girl to appear out of thin air.

  For the first time in a long time, I feel that shiver of investigative excitement. That sense of heat, a glimpse of light.

  That day, I brought Hayley a bunch of pink and white stocks. Thick clusters of flowers and perfume, spicy and rich. But they don’t quite feel enough. I walk outside. Scavenge the hedgerows and come back with a bunch of wildflowers. Nothing really good, but plenty of cow parsley and some branches of wild cherry blossom. Hayley has no vases, but she has jugs and mugs aplenty and I bestow my flowers round the room, till it looks like a wedding festival.

  That night, I drive back – park in Llandaff, careful about who sees me – but can’t return home straight away. I need company, the company of the living, so go down to the hostel and spend the whole evening there. Watching telly. Listening to Clementina’s impenetrable anecdotes. Smoking with Gary’s Big Issue mates, but not him, because he’s on the piss and is banned from the hostel until he sobers.

  It’s a lovely evening, capping off another wonderful day. Fiona Grey is a happy creature. I’m lucky to have her.

  26

  Early June.

  Summer in the city, except that the city seems trapped in a gloomy cycle of brisk winds and scudding, intermittent rain. At the weekend, the Queen celebrated her Jubilee with a small armada of boats crowding the Thames. But the river was grey and furious, the wind unceasing, the rain constant. I didn’t watch most of the coverage – I was down at the hostel, engaged in laundry chores and table football – but found something impressive about the sheer wetness of the whole episode. That people endured it. That they chose to.

  And through all of this my life continues to progress. In the early mornings, I clean. During the day, I do my payroll clerking and manage Henderson’s fraud. See either Quintrell or Henderson at least once a week. Sometimes more.

  When Henderson’s on duty, he comes to my flat. The last couple of times, he’s been businesslike and brisk, but he seems different this time. More open. More widely curious.

  As I get on my eccentrically bottomed saucepan on to heat water for tea, he inspects my studio in detail. The yellow sheet on the fridge. My meagre kitchen utensils. The interior of my wardrobe: its few clothes and not-very-healthy cannabis plants.

  He says, ‘You could get somewhere better now, couldn’t you? You’ve got two jobs, plus what we pay you.’

  ‘I’m saving up.’

  ‘For emigration?’

  I nod.

  ‘You hate it here that much?’

  I glance out of the window. At the nine-lane road. The rain. Spray-paint graffiti on a garden wall. At the metallic insects and their unreachable heaven.

  He laughs and says, ‘You’re probably right. You’re probably right.’

 
His curiosity also extends to my laptop.

  ‘You don’t get internet in here? You don’t want it?’

  I shrug and look fiercely down.

  I don’t know if Henderson ever had a police training, or similar, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Most interrogators rush things. Fill the silence. Henderson is happy to scrutinise. To let these little micro-expressions talk to him.

  He studies me a while, then pushes again. ‘You can get deals for nothing these days. Fifteen quid a month, something like that.’

  I start speaking, choke a bit, clear my throat and try a second time. ‘It’s on contract.’

  ‘On contract?’ Henderson is puzzled for a moment, then figures it out. ‘It’s your credit rating, is it?’

  ‘They want past addresses. I haven’t always had all this.’ I wave a hand at my newly come by opulence. The Sun King showing off a newly landscaped deer park.

  ‘Look, if you want—’

  I shake my head. ‘I go to the library. It’s fine.’

  Again, Henderson inspects me. I don’t meet his eye. I seldom do. Just let him hold me under his gaze until he’s done.

  It’s a curious feeling to be appraised like this. If I had to bet, I’d say that Henderson was in the room when Kureishi was killed and, quite likely, the one swinging the chopper. That edge of brutality never feels far distant. Like rocks lying underwater with nothing showing but a curl of white foam and too much seething silence. Yet I don’t dislike spending time with him. He’s kinder to me than Quintrell is. Something more human, even in his cruelty.

  As if reading my thoughts, he produces a small gift from his bag. ‘Here. For you.’

  A small chocolate cake in a box, tied with a pink ribbon.

  I realise the cake comes from one of the posh patisseries whose windows so attracted Fiona Grey on one of her Sunday wanderings. Henderson is creepy enough to follow her, nice enough to buy her cake.

  I can’t do the maths on that, but say thank you anyway.

  ‘OK, shall we take a look at what you’ve been up to?’

  I get out my papers. Forms, photocopies, lists. Place them in front of him on the little Formica table. Say, ‘Do you want tea?’

  Henderson looks uncertain. A man trying to work out whether it would be more polite to say yes or no. He chooses yes.

  The water in my funny saucepan is boiling now, so I get out my only mug and a bowl. Make peppermint tea in the bowl for me, tea in the mug for him. Cut two slices of cake and put them on a plate.

  ‘I don’t have milk, sorry, but if you want, I can . . .’

  ‘No, that’s fine. As long as it’s hot and wet, eh?’

  He sits at the Formica table and pores over my documents.

  I sit on the arm of my armchair and watch the rain, the cars, the first glow from sodium street lights. Nibble cake.

  Henderson isn’t picky the way Quintrell is. I don’t know what he checks, to be honest. I don’t think he has the accountancy skills to know what’s right and what isn’t. The few times he’s tried to question things in my work, he’s revealed a pretty slim understanding of the underlying mechanics.

  But it’s nice, these sessions. For the first time, I feel properly attuned to the corpses that brought me here. Hayley Morgan: a troubled woman, who ate rat poison and plaster sooner than walk down the hill to ask for help. Saj Kureishi: a thief who fell out with his bosses and sold his life for £5,600. Their presences are with me now.

  And my iPad has made me feel less isolated. Brattenbury’s boys have built a very secure nest for the machine, in the bathroom boxwork. When I’m not using my internet connection to research my father and Gareth Glyn, I spend my time trawling the Tinker data too.

  It’s impressive. Brattenbury has, I’d estimate, a team equivalent to about thirty full-time officers. Some of those are borrowed from my own department at Cathays. Others are head-office analysts. Computer technicians in south London. Communications experts in Cheltenham. SOCA’s own surveillance specialists.

  Armed officers too. Until I saw the case files properly, I hadn’t realised the effort that goes into protecting me. Every time I’ve met Henderson or Quintrell, Brattenbury has had a minimum of two armed officers within sixty seconds of me. There are, right now, two armed officers in a van waiting on Laytonia Road. Three further uniformed officers, two of them armed, in a patrol car no more than half a mile distant.

  And yet – what have we accomplished? Almost nothing. We have nothing to justify a murder charge. We could certainly nail both Henderson and Quintrell for fraud, but this case demands charges far bigger than merely that. The Astra-man, Allan Wiley, we can’t attach to any crime, though we’re certain he’s part of the group. Indeed, Henderson talks a lot about ‘his colleagues’ and implies the existence of a substantial organisation behind him, yet we can’t even glimpse it, let alone destroy it.

  Brattenbury did follow up on my suggestion about trying to track a Kureishi replacement. They looked for times and dates when Henderson and Quintrell seemed to be in the same place. There were numerous matches in Cardiff – just what you’d expect from two mobile people living together in the same, mid-sized city – but almost none elsewhere. There was a time they were both in Central London – CCTV shows their cars making use of the same car park – but it proved impossible to link that visit to any dodgy IT consultant living locally. On another occasion, they both made use of the same hotel just outside Heathrow airport. They were day visitors only, neither of them spending a night there, but both made use of the car park for a full eight hours.

  Aside from those frustratingly suggestive encounters, there was a possible rendezvous in Swansea, but the overlap time might have been no more than twenty or thirty minutes, suggesting that the ‘meeting’ was no more than coincidence. Another possible rendezvous in Chepstow, but on a race day, which could suggest either coincidence or a social encounter.

  Brattenbury has done what I’d have wanted to do in his place. Try to find IT consultants of doubtful honesty and link them to any of these places. No joy.

  He’s also obtained guest data for the relevant dates from the airport hotel, but the names don’t correlate with anything useful, either on our own national databases or on those available via Interpol. In any case, the hotel only registers actual guests. Those who make use of the hotel’s ample conference and business facilities aren’t separately registered. Brattenbury also checked on those booking conference suites. Henderson’s name doesn’t show up, but most of the bookings are made in company names, many of which are untraceable.

  Efforts to track Tinker’s money have also failed. Run into the golden sands of the Virgin Islands. Lost in the bougainvillea-scented shades of Panama and Belize.

  Surveillance of Henderson has still thrown up nothing of value. He travels to London frequently. Goes abroad – Paris, Geneva, Barcelona – fairly often, but for short trips. SOCA’s surveillance guys seem to think that he doesn’t normally care if he’s followed. On occasions when he does, he is scrupulous about losing any tail before going wherever it is he goes.

  On one occasion, just one, we have something which might be suggestive. It was on a day when Brattenbury’s guys were certain that he was deliberately avoiding surveillance. Drove south-west, then abruptly turned back towards Cardiff, dived off to the coast, then twisted and turned in Penarth and Grangetown until he’d burned off any tails. And yet ninety minutes after we’d lost him, he showed up again ordering lunch at a bistro in the Cardiff city centre.

  The sighting was completely random – one of Brattenbury’s men was getting an end-of-shift hamburger and just happened to make the identification – but the implications are interesting. Henderson had last been seen in the Cardiff Bay area. Assuming he’d spent thirty minutes doing whatever it was he was doing that day, he couldn’t have travelled more than twenty or thirty minutes from Cardiff to do it.

  That’s enough time, just about, to get as far as Newport, not enough to get to Swansea. Love Newport though I
do, it’s hardly a world centre of sophisticated criminal activity, which suggests that whatever Henderson was up to was taking place in Cardiff . . . except that he might simply have changed his mind, had a call cancelling any meeting, or any other of a thousand things. To some extent, Brattenbury’s guys have been able to track Henderson’s movements prior to the bistro by reviewing CCTV footage, but the trail died in one of the little side roads off the Hayes. Another dead end.

  The plain fact is that Brattenbury has discovered almost nothing of value, and shabby little Fiona Grey remains the only ace in his denuded deck.

  So I sit there, on the arm of my slumbering, velour bear, sipping my tea and feeling the rain. I have a murderer and two corpses for company. The steel tip of a javelin that is travelling nowhere.

  Henderson sits at my Formica table and studies my documents.

  And then – it all changes. I sense it from the way Henderson looks up at me from the table. His face has a gravity in it. A weight.

  ‘This is good, Fiona. It’s all good.’

  I don’t say anything to that. Not even a ‘thank you’. Henderson doesn’t expect one. We both know this is an introduction to something else.

  ‘Even Anna thinks so. I know she doesn’t always show it.’

  I don’t answer.

  The thing that Henderson isn’t saying is now the biggest thing in the room. Bigger than my armchair. Bigger than either of us.

  ‘And you’re happy with us, are you? You’ve got no complaints?’

  I’m not here any more. This is Fiona Grey’s world, not mine, and it’s she who sits in her grey skirt and white child’s polycotton blouse, staring out at Henderson. She’s scared, I feel it. I think she’s right to be.

  I don’t say anything and Henderson continues softly.