The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (16 page)

Start to cook, but also float over to his computer, which is switched on. Open up his web browser. Click Options on the browser menu, then select Security. The Security tab should really be called an Insecurity tab because, among other flim-flam, it asks if I want to see Saved Passwords. I do. Get a list of sites – only about quarter of them porno – with stored usernames. I click the button that offers to Show Passwords. It says, ‘Are you sure?’ which doesn’t strike me as the world’s most testing security interrogation. I select ‘Yes’ and a complete list appears on screen.

OLIVIA06.

The name of his daughter and the year of her birth. A single password controlling a million different accounts.
Thank you, Olivia. Thank you, Jason.
The simple perils of fatherly love.

I close everything and go back to the stove.

That night before I go to bed, I throw open my window and make myself a joint, a big one, fat with hash.

Smoke it, slowly, with a cup of peppermint tea and a box of chocolates – a little extra gift from Buzz – on the arm of the chair.

Normally at this stage in a murder investigation, I’m very well acquainted with the victims. Have their faces pinned up by my desk. At home, even. The faces of the dead, photographed at the scene of their death. Postcards sent from their world to ours.

I find it strange, disorienting, not having those images available to me. It seems almost irreverent to go chasing off after murderers without the victims at the cold dead center of the chase. A wedding without a bride. A feast without wine.

I’ve also felt uncomfortable being so far removed from Brattenbury’s inquiry. From one perspective, of course, I’m the steel point on the tip of SOCA’s javelin. The thing that forces entry, opens the flesh, does the damage. But I’m also a copper and a Cambridge graduate. The policewoman in me wants to see the inquiry’s records. To see the data remorselessly collecting. Lists of names, dates, phone calls, bank transfers. Witness statements and officers’ reports. The Cambridge graduate in me likes the same thing. Puts her trust in paperwork, the primary sources for any inquiry.

It’s not even that Brattenbury
can’t
keep me abreast of these things in the limited time we have available, it’s that he doesn’t want to. The undercover operating manual says that the more fully I live in role, the less likely I am to commit an error. So Brattenbury tells me the minimum, tries to restrict every investigative impulse I have.

He’s a good investigator, but careful. And I don’t do well with careful.

I eat a chocolate, finish my joint, finish my tea, get ready for bed.

I’m conscious of Henderson’s camera now, but not paranoid. If I pass it in my underwear, I don’t care too much. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve got weapons of my own.

When Jason fixed the coat hook on my door, the extra protrusion meant it kept banging up against the wardrobe. So we shifted the wardrobe sideways. Only a few inches, but enough.

In the envelope Buzz left for me was the iPad my dad gave me for Christmas, also the cash, and also the name of a street in Llandaff, just across the river from here.

In bed, under the duvet, hidden from Henderson’s gaze, I turn the iPad on, wait for it to scout out the local wireless networks. It finds a few – it would do in here – and I poke around until I find Jason’s. The system asks me for a password and I offer it Jason’s tender homage to his daughter.
OLIVIA06.

The tablet thinks about that, then admits me, unaccusingly, to the world of the digital. Working under the duvet, I start to explore the world I’ve been missing.

A world of investigation and the faces of the dead.

23.

Pontcanna. One of those posh streets that run down alongside Cathedral Road. I’m sitting on a doorstep, or Fiona Grey is. Same old coat, same old bag. Plane trees not yet in leaf, but you can feel them getting ready. A hidden murmur.

It’s eleven fifteen in the morning.

I’ve been here two hours.

In the house behind me lives ‘Alison’. Real name: Anna Quintrell. Occupation: dodgy accountant. Having internet access via my iPad means that I can, finally, get to see the data being assembled by Brattenbury’s team. When I had my run-in with Quintrell, Brattenbury’s guys were there to document it. The man in a waxed jacket who asked us if we were all right was one of his men. So was the driver who fixed us in his headlights, a simple way to ensure that his partner’s video was properly lit.

The Audi was registered to Anna Quintrell, address here in Pontcanna. A basic PNC check revealed that Quintrell was cited in a major false accounting case three years back. She escaped conviction because of errors made by the CPS during prosecution, but she was kicked out of the Association of Chartered Accountants and must have had difficulty earning an honest crust since that point.

According to the Tinker case notes, Quintrell’s house will soon be, and perhaps already is, under surveillance. I imagine they won’t enter the house itself – that would be too crude for Brattenbury – but they’ll find a way to enter one of the houses to either side. Perhaps both. Before Christmas, when I was still getting briefed, one of the SOCA technical guys told me they can do the whole job – enter the house, place the bug, make good, withdraw – in ten to fifteen minutes. They don’t even need to enter the suspect’s property, which means the chance of detection is close to zero.

But Fiona Grey can’t rely on police data for her info. When I was at work, I called the various different Audi garages in Cardiff, saying that I’d brought an Audi TT in for repairs to the bodywork. The first two garages blanked me. The receptionist at the third said, ‘Ah yes, Anna Quintrell, isn’t it?’ I said yes and complained that I hadn’t yet had an estimate through. The receptionist apologized and said she was sure one had been sent. I asked them to confirm where they were sending it and the woman gave me the address whose doorstep I’m sitting on now.

Deception is so easy, I wonder why it isn’t more common.

Time moves on.

Plane trees print abstract shapes on the pavement. Kids pass, with mothers in tow. A delivery man brings a parcel to the house across the street.

I think Quintrell is at home. She didn’t answer the door when I arrived, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard movements from within. There are net curtains on the windows.

According to the Tinker case notes, the mole at Fielding Insurance has been arrested, meaning that Roy Williams is about to ‘go live’.

I think about Hayley Morgan. I’ve looked at all the scene-of-crime photos now, about a million times. There’s something beautifully quiet in the lighting. The gentle light of a Vermeer painting. Filtered by glass, falling on slate flags, finding the sheen in cooking pots and old plaster. All that, and Hayley Morgan’s little corpse. Restrained and peaceful, like a scatter of apples on a linen cloth.

I haven’t really got to know her. I’d like to visit her again.

At twelve thirty, a police car glides up the road and stops. A couple of uniforms step out and approach me. I don’t recognize them, nor they me.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Been here a while, haven’t you?’

‘I’m waiting for someone.’

They ask my name and who I’m waiting for and what my business is. I answer ‘Fiona Jones’ to the first question: Fiona Grey is a wanted woman. The other questions I don’t have to answer, so I don’t. The officers try to get me to go away and come back later. Demand to see ID. I do have my Fiona Grey ID on me, as it happens, but I don’t have to hand it over, so I don’t. I’m not committing any offence by being here so there’s nothing anyone can do to shift me. They hassle me a bit more, then retreat to their patrol car and sit there another minute or two, lights flashing. When the car leaves, the street feels very empty. In the house diagonally opposite me, a woman comes to the front door, stares at me for thirty seconds, then disappears again.

I like this street. I think maybe plane trees are my favorite sort.

When one of the mums returns from wherever she’s been, minus the kids this time, I smile at her but she looks away.

At two fifteen, a black BMW noses down the road and parks. Vic Henderson gets out, straightens his jacket, blips his car locked. He starts walking towards me, but before he does, there’s just a brief moment where he settles his expression. His face is now smoothed into a friendly, civilized, let’s-all-be-reasonable look, but I don’t think that’s what it was saying when I first noticed it. He was twenty yards away from me, perhaps more, and the moment was fleeting, but I think there was something fierce in that face. Something brutal.

An easy violence.

I try to keep everything out of my expression. No hope, no surprise, no fear, no expectation.

The little path up to the front step is paved in two-inch tiles, black and white. A black-painted iron gate. Henderson has his hand on the latch before he speaks.

‘Fiona.’

I shrug, or half shrug. I don’t even know if the movement is visible through my coat.

‘You’ve been here a while, eh?’

Shrug.

‘OK. Let’s go in.’

‘She’s not there.’

‘I think you might be wrong about that.’

Henderson rings on the doorbell, then steps to the window and raps on it, putting his face to the glass so whoever’s inside can see him if they choose to.

A moment later, the door unlocks. Anna Quintrell – ‘Alison’ – opens it. She stares down at me. She’s wearing a red skirt and dark top. Make-up, hair glossily perfect. When I saw her before, she didn’t look like this, but I imagine she’d been pulled out of bed at very short notice. She looked good, given that.

Quintrell says, ‘Come in.’ Henderson stands between me and the road. I have a sudden sense of being herded.

I stand, awkwardly nervous, until Quintrell steps back. The hallway opens up. I hesitate a moment longer, then step inside.

They lead me through to the kitchen. A surprisingly large modern extension. Big windows looking out onto one of those Japanese-style modern gardens. Slatted decking, potted ferns, concealed lighting.

No one asks me to sit, so I stand there, in my coat, holding my bag against my belly.

Henderson and Quintrell exchange glances. Then it’s Henderson, not Quintrell, who asks, ‘Do you want anything to drink?’

I do one of my invisible shrugs, then clear my throat. Say, ‘I’ll have a glass of water, please.’

Quintrell gets me a glass. I sit down at the kitchen table. Some blond wood, Nordic thing. The sort that looks almost identical to an IKEA table but costs five times more.

Henderson tells Quintrell to make him coffee, then says, ‘Fiona, we’re not very happy with you. Not happy at all.’

I say nothing.

‘Now Anna and I have colleagues. And we’ve been talking about you. A long and difficult discussion, if I’m honest.’

I say nothing. Quintrell stands by her Italian coffee maker and does whatever you have to do to make those things work.

‘There are two schools of thought,’ Henderson continues. ‘School one says you’re more trouble than you’re worth. We make a call to your bosses, tell them to give you a drug test, have you removed from Western Vale. Perhaps we also give your name to the police, just to see if they’re interested.’

I don’t know what my face shows at that. What I do know is that Fiona Grey feels frightened. Actual fear that tightens up the belly, sends its cold fingers into the capillaries and nerve endings.

That’s a good reaction, of course. Fiona Grey is a ‘person wanted in connection with’ a stabbing in Manchester. If the police who arrived earlier had taken my ID, the system would have flagged me up and they’d have taken me into custody, awaiting further instructions from their colleagues in Greater Manchester.

But more interesting to me is the way I feel Fiona Grey’s emotions more easily than my own. I’ve been frightened before, of course, and fear is one of the feelings that, I think, I identify more reliably than some others. But still. Fiona Grey feels fear and –
boom!
– it’s there throughout her body. She feels it with an immediacy and naturalness that I seldom manage on my own account.

I don’t know what my face shows, but it shows something.

I can tell that Henderson is pleased.

‘Of course, if you have nothing to hide, the police won’t be interested, will they?’

I still don’t say anything, so he continues.

‘The second school of thought says we give you another chance. A chance to show us that you can do what we need you to do. Without causing problems. Without doing twelve hundred pounds’ worth of damage to Anna’s car here. And without causing a scene at her home address. Getting the police called out.’

He stares at me. A vivisectionist pondering where to make the next incision.

Quintrell comes to the table with two of those tiny white espresso cups. I grip my water. I haven’t yet touched it.

Stare at Henderson.

‘And I’d love to tell you that we’ve come to a decision. But we haven’t. We really haven’t.’

‘What you did to my car was totally uncalled for.’ Quintrell has a taut asperity in her voice. A wintriness. ‘It was vandalism, pure and simple.’

‘The question is,’ says Henderson, ‘what you can do to put things right. Whether you
want
to put things right.’

This is bullying. There’s not even a would-you-like-a-drink pretense about it now. Henderson has an unconcealed aggression that seems natural to him. Quintrell isn’t physically threatening in the same way, but there’s something cruel in the room now. Blood in the water and a skirmish of sharks.

I say, sulkily, ‘She followed me. I didn’t know she had anything to do with you.’

‘I don’t care. Do you understand that? I don’t care.’ Henderson forces me to look at him. ‘My colleagues and I have a lot at stake here. You can help us or you can get in the way. If you get in the way, we will discard you. Do you understand?’

I nod.

‘So,’ Henderson says. ‘We need an answer. Are you going to help us?’

When I learned French at school – and I was never very good at languages – I remember a lesson on how to ask questions. You could create a question by sticking
Est-ce que
onto the start of a sentence. Or you could invert the subject and the verb. Or, simplest of all, you could just end your sentence with the phrase
n’est-ce pas
, but – and this was the bit that stuck with me – you could only do that if you were expecting the answer
yes
.