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

  These things arouse a flurry of activity. A meeting is held jointly between the Devon and Cornwall Major Crime Unit, the Serious Fraud Office, SOCA and ourselves. We are represented by DI Mick Adams of our Fraud unit, Dennis Jackson and myself.

  I’ve never been in one of these things before: big beasts loping around a carcass, figuring out their dominance hierarchy. I’m only here as a little courtesy from Jackson, who recognises my role in connecting Kureishi to the fraud.

  The man from the SFO, a pinched, black-suited man, is the first to fold his hand.

  ‘The size of the fraud is perhaps large enough,’ he says. ‘We’re not really equipped to handle frauds of less than a million or so, but this may pass muster on that account. On the other hand, we have to ask, is this case likely to be of widespread public concern? Does it call for our specialist knowledge? I have to say, I think we might prefer to leave the matter in your, no doubt capable, hands.’

  The no doubt capable hands round the table look at the SFO guy in much the same way as they’d study a Bangkok ladyboy in full regalia. Appalled disbelief.

  Jackson, taking charge, says, ‘OK.’

  ‘Our main concern, really, is with the smooth functioning of financial markets.’

  The SFO guy looks set to go on, explaining why the case is beneath him, but Jackson just says again, ‘OK. Thank you for coming,’ and gestures at the door.

  The SFO guy halts, looks bemused, then gathers up his papers and leaves.

  No one says anything, but no one needs to. If the atmosphere in the room could be distilled down to a single word, that word would begin with a ‘w’ and rhyme with banker.

  That leaves us, our West country cousins, and SOCA. The Devon and Cornwall force are represented by a DCI, Jackson’s counterpart, and her gopher. The DCI, Mary Widdicombe, says, ‘This isn’t our fraud, but it is our murder. We also recognise that the murder, almost certainly, arose as a consequence of the fraud. We don’t care how you,’ she makes a gesture that includes the rest of us, ‘investigate the fraud. We just need to know that your inquiry will have the investigation and prosecution of this murder as a central objective. And we will need to have one of our officers seconded to the core investigation team.’

  Widdicombe – dark brown hair worn long, blue eyes, but a strong jaw, strong demeanour – holds her gaze steady as she says the last bit, but we all know that her last remarks are aimed at SOCA.

  The senior SOCA representative here is a man called Adrian Brattenbury. He seems perfectly sensible, but the agency has strong linkages with the security services and is viewed as more than a little suspect by many police officers. SOCA likes to talk about its ability to ‘disrupt organised crime’ and prides itself on its intelligence-led investigative approach. Which is all good. Organised crime needs to be disrupted and a stupidity-led approach is unlikely to pay dividends. On the other hand, good intelligence tends to become all about the preservation of sources, while any competent police investigation has to end with doors being kicked down and bad guys being led away in handcuffs. For simple coppers, like Jackson, Widdicombe and myself, it’s hard to see how organised crime is being disrupted if we don’t see the heads of major crime organisations being successfully prosecuted in a British courtroom.

  But still. Widdicombe hasn’t exactly folded her hand, but she’s taking a pace back from the carcass. That leaves Brattenbury and Jackson still facing off.

  ‘I’m with Mary,’ says Jackson. ‘Fraud on this scale – not to mention potentially complicated IT issues – that’s not something we particularly want to handle. But we need a prosecution out of this. A Cardiff resident was murdered. The frauds took place here. We need to know that the perpetrators will be brought to justice and in a timely manner.’

  Brattenbury has dark curly hair, a bright pink shirt, charcoal pinstripe suit and an air of intelligence, which I like. He says, ‘Yes, of course. Look, our objectives are the same as yours. We want to put criminals behind bars.’

  ‘We’d need staff on the team. Seconded to you, but reporting to me.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we do usually work with local staff. We need to. Our regional offices are very lean. Obviously, on a live case, we have to be very careful about who knows what, we’re very rigorous about protecting our officers, but—’

  ‘No.’ Jackson isn’t loud, but he doesn’t have to be. ‘No. That phrase, that attitude. It’s a no. Mary’s got a murder. I’ve got a fraud at least, maybe a manslaughter as well. If you boys and girls at SOCA want a piece of this, it’s on our terms. And those terms do not include cutting me or Mary out of the loop. We’re not negotiating here. And by the way, Mary and I are detective chief inspectors. We know something about protecting our bloody officers and we’re not about to take lessons from you.’

  He looks at Widdicombe, who nods once, briefly.

  They both look at Brattenbury, who clears his throat and says, ‘I’m sure we can sort something out.’

  Jackson says, ‘We are sorting something out. If you need to make a call, the office next door is free.’

  Brattenbury heads off with his phone. To me, Jackson says, ‘Fiona, get us some drinks, would you?’

  I take orders and go off to fetch coffees. I’m aware that I’m representing the South Wales force and am proud that my coffee-making skills have been called upon. I seek to excel.

  By the time I return, all is sweetness and light.

  Jackson, Adams, Widdicombe, Brattenbury and Widdi-combe’s gopher are standing by the conference room window getting a guided tour of central Cardiff from Jackson’s stabbing index finger. I’m not welcome on his tour bus. ‘OK, Fiona, thank you,’ meaning that my services are no longer required.

  I leave.

  And that’s it. I hear nothing further. As I understand things, Mick Adams from our Fraud Squad is seconded to the SOCA inquiry. Presumably someone of similar rank from Devon and Cornwall. Presumably Jackson and Widdicombe get what they need. But nothing filters down to me.

  I’m only partly sorry. Whatever else this case may be, it’s going to involve a lot of complex computer analysis, a lot of painstaking financial audits. That kind of work is tailor-made for SOCA – they inherited the whole of what used to be the National Hi-tech Crime Unit and they have forensic financial skills second only to those of the SFO. And none of that appeals to me. Much as I relish Kureishi’s exsanguinated corpse, much as I like the odour of organised crime that floats over the entire investigation, I’m not interested in computers or financial accounts. I like the objects of the inquiry, but not its probable methods. I go back to my busy little detective constable life, being given orders by people I don’t always respect, executing those orders, writing up a completed action report and repeating the process. We have no interesting murders in stock at the moment, but we have our normal helping of assault, rape and violent stupidity. It’s a thin diet, but I get by.

  The one real highlight: I point out an anomaly in the case so far to Dennis Jackson. The superstore fraud involved two unwitting accomplices: Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan. They were excellent choices for the fraud in one way, because they were real people, with real addresses. The audit software used to detect payroll frauds would never have flashed an alert faced with these names.

  Yet, I don’t think the names were chosen by accident. Hayley Morgan was an isolated stroke victim with some cognitive impairments. Adele Gibson is learning impaired and relies on a social worker for help with basic household finance and the like. People like that don’t always have the tools needed to challenge strange behaviour in their finances – and until the last few months, they hadn’t actually been made any worse off by the scam. They were carefully chosen targets. Chosen by someone in a position to pick.

  I nudge Jackson. He nudges the Fraud Squad. They discover that Sajid Kureishi’s sister-in-law, Razia Riaz, worked as a receptionist at Cardiff Social Care Services in Grangetown. Discover that she had interfered with the flow of correspondence in order to keep care workers in
the dark.

  She’s arrested and charged with fraud. Under interrogation, she admitted that she had, a year and a half back, obtained the signatures needed from Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan to gain access to their bank accounts. I wasn’t present at the arrest or the interrogation, but Gethin Stephens, the new Fraud Squad DI, told me that she was a nasty piece of work, venomous and vindictive, and with no apparent remorse for the consequences of her actions.

  The CPS are considering a manslaughter charge and I hope they go ahead.

  And that’s the story as we now have it. Kureishi found a way to penetrate corporate computers. His sister-in-law found a way to generate appropriate payroll dummies for the fraud. The pair of them obtained some false identity documents and set up a bank account which they used to channel their money. The first of them is dead, the second awaiting prosecution. We don’t know quite why Kureishi went on the run and probably never will, but he must have got scared that his partners in organised crime were getting tired of him. He stole what he could. Ran when he could. And got killed anyway.

  That’s all I really know. I do my regular work and try to remember that I have a life.

  When Buzz asks if I have a swimsuit, I say I have no swimsuits but two bikinis. He asks if my passport is valid. I say that I’ve checked and it is.

  And strange to say, I find I’m excited by the prospect of holiday. I’ve never felt that before. I’ve normally avoided holiday completely or approached it with a kind of anxiety. But this feels different. And when Buzz says, ‘Are you looking forward to it?’, I say, ‘I am, I really am.’ When he laughs at me, I laugh too.

  12

  Wednesday 9 November. Two weeks and two days before Buzz and I fly out to Miami. I get a call from Jackson.

  ‘Do you have a minute?’ he says. He speaks with an unusual gentleness, the way he might if I actually had a choice.

  I go up. His office: a large, black leatherette sofa, a couple of art prints on the wall, one of those pointless office plants – a stringy palmate thing, that sits in a ceramic pot full of what looks like ceramic gravel.

  On the sofa, Brattenbury, wearing a dark jacket over a plum-coloured V-neck. He looks cooler than coppers are meant to look. Makes Jackson look older and tireder than he really is.

  I sit down.

  ‘Fiona, you remember Adrian Brattenbury. He’s the Senior Investigating Officer on Operation Tinker.’

  ‘Tinker?’

  Brattenbury says, ‘The computer allocates names. We don’t pick ’em.’

  ‘Adrian, if you want to give Fiona a quick overview.’

  There’s a smoked glass coffee table in front of the sofa. Papers on it, including some six by ten photo sheets, but turned so I can’t see them.

  Brattenbury nods, but first looks straight at me and says, ‘Nice to meet you properly. I understand Dennis here has a lot of faith in you.’

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I just sit. When Brattenbury figures out that I’m not going to say anything, he continues, ‘Tinker. It’s turning into a biggie. Thanks to your work in identifying Kureishi, we’ve been able to trace nine different frauds, eight of those payroll-related. One of them an expense-based thing: the same, but different. Total monthly amount stolen is in excess of a quarter of a million pounds. At the current rate, about three point eight million a year.’

  Perhaps I look surprised, because he adds, ‘We haven’t closed anything down. Not yet. If we do, our chances of securing convictions on the perpetrators fall to about zero. These are big companies for the most part and most of them have an existing policy of cooperating with police investigation. Those that don’t – well, they’re on board for now. How long that goes on for, I don’t know. But for the time being, we’re OK.’

  He waits to see if I want to say something, but I still don’t, so he continues, ‘It looks like the basic mechanics of the fraud were initially set up by Kureishi. He installed software that gave external access to payroll. We’re confident he was not the ultimate beneficiary of the fraud. We simply can’t find enough money or signs of heavy spending. And the set-up looks remarkably professional. The fraud involves over a hundred and fifty dummy UK bank accounts. The money siphons via Spain, Portugal or Jersey to Belize. The Belize bank account is fronted by nominees and owned by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. That shell company in turn is owned by a foundation in Panama. We’ve got the best investigators we have trying to crack that little nut open, but frankly our chances are very low. And even if we peel things back to Panama, they’ll quite likely just pull the money back through a whole lot of anonymous shell companies, through difficult or corrupt jurisdictions, and we’ll get nowhere at all.’

  It occurs to me that Jersey and the British Virgin Islands are both under the jurisdiction of the British government, and that the Queen is head of state in Belize. It also occurs to me that making these places world centres for shell companies, nominee accounts, loosely controlled money and zero corporate taxation is not necessarily consistent with what our government is there to do.

  I don’t say this, though. Just sit there and try to look intelligent.

  Brattenbury continues. ‘Our assumption is that even if Kureishi originated the fraud, he lost control of it to criminals with far more extensive resources and experience. Kureishi got greedy or had some falling-out with his employers. They handled that the way these guys tend to do. Our primary investigative goal is therefore to find the ultimate controllers of this fraud and to bring them to justice. Charges of fraud and murder.’

  I nod. I still don’t know why I’m here, except that I think I do.

  I keep looking at the six by tens.

  I am feeling something. A cold distance that comes between me and my body, a band of December fog. I normally like to pursue these feelings, to see if I can understand and name them, but the time and place for that exercise is not now. Not now and not here.

  ‘Your furniture superstore,’ says Brattenbury. ‘That was the smallest fraud, the earliest, and the least sophisticated. I think you’d call it a proof of concept test. They’ve been building from there. The current frauds, the larger ones, are built on a much larger scale and need more . . . more care and attention.’

  I nod. Keep looking at the pictures. Keep feeling that December fog.

  ‘With the bigger companies, backdoor access to a single computer terminal doesn’t give the fraudsters what they need. They need someone onsite as well. Basically, they use that initial opening to design the fraud. To figure out the company’s systems, how to get around the safeguards. Then, when they’ve figured out a scam that will work, they recruit a mole within the company. The mole executes the plan and monitors it.’

  I say, or try to say, ‘A payroll clerk, someone like that,’ but no words seem to come out, so I clear my throat and try again.

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ he says when he understands me. ‘Exactly.’

  He goes on talking. The current plan is to terminate most of the frauds in what Brattenbury calls a ‘natural’ way. Basically, he intends to nudge the companies’ internal auditors to make the checks that will expose the fraud, seemingly as part of the company’s regular audit process.

  ‘We do, however, want to leave two or three of the bigger scams running. We don’t want the perpetrators to feel they’ve been found out. Luckily, the two biggest scams affect insurance companies, both of whom pay out tens of millions of pounds annually as a result of organised crime, so they’re particularly keen to be helpful. They’ve given us as much systems access as we need. We can see literally every single keystroke, every mouseclick on the relevant computers.’

  I nod. I’m not particularly good with computers, but I know these things aren’t particularly difficult. You can get remote monitoring software for twenty or thirty pounds online. If the corporate’s IT staff are being helpful, you can probably achieve the same effect by tweaking a few settings on some admin panel.

  I also know, though, that you don’t break
organised crime syndicates by computer monitoring alone.

  ‘We have identified the local moles. That’s not hard, as you know. But we don’t want the moles, we want the people controlling them. And the people profiting from them. And we’ve got nowhere. Nowhere at all. We haven’t closed with the enemy because, the truth is, we’ve no idea who the enemy is.’

  I nod. I don’t seem to have a working voicebox, so I stop trying to use it.

  ‘Infiltration,’ says Brattenbury. ‘We want to plant an operative in their camp. Make some identifications. Get some surveillance going.’

  Nod.

  Stare down at the six by tens.

  Brattenbury has, I’m sure, noticed the direction of my gaze before now, but this is the first time he responds directly. He flips the photos over one by one, leaving just a singleton still face down on the table.

  The photos are of people. Mugshots and full length profiles. One of them is of me. I’m wearing something from Next. Pale blue blouse, cardigan, grey skirt, dark court shoes. Bland, safe, officey.

  There are four other photos, all of men. Men in their thirties or younger forties. Short hair. Muscular, or at least tough-looking. Narrow eyes, strong jaws. The men are all wearing jeans. Dark shirts or T-shirts. Casual jackets, one leather, one denim, the two others not far removed from the same denim-leather school of couture. Four men with a whiff of the macho.

  I recognise three of the men: my colleagues. One I don’t, but I assume he’s a copper too, just one I haven’t met. The three men I recognise have all worked undercover.

  I know where this is going.

  ‘I understand you’ve just completed your undercover course.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did very well. An unusually strong performance, I’m told.’

  I shrug. ‘It was a training thing, not a real thing.’ That’s not wonderful English, but at least my voice seems to be working again.