The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (3 page)

Brydon and I are a fairly public couple now, treated by a unit as our colleagues. We’re careful to be properly professional while at the office, but out here, at the end of the day, in a time which might be an after-hours social or might, if Dunwoody is feeling generous, count as formal overtime, those rules are more relaxed. Buzz and I sit side by side on one of the stone benches. He had his arm around me earlier, as a way of showing that he was relaxed. He’s removed it now, but I can still feel its phantom weight across my shoulders, the warmth of him down my side.

The table is littered. Bank statements. Phone bills. Water bills. Electricity. Correspondence. Everyone leaves the paperwork to me. Fi Griffiths, the paperwork kid. I don’t mind, except when Dunwoody puts his beer down on one of the phone bills, creating a ring mark.

‘That’s Exhibit A under your beer glass,’ I say.

He moves the paper, not the beer.

With Hayley Morgan, it’s the same deal as it was with Adele Gibson. For eighteen months she received money from the superstore, but that money vanished again, almost immediately, to an account operated by T.M. Baron. For most of that period, the rest of Morgan’s finances were untouched. She had a tiny income, tiny expenses, but she got by. Lived as she chose. Then twelve weeks ago, her account was drained. Every penny that came in was instantly taken. At the end of every day, her account registered a balance of £0.00.

Before long, her phone was cut off. Then her electricity.

I think of Morgan licking the sugar out of an empty packet, in a house gone dark. Think of her looking at the packet of rat poison and thinking, ‘How much longer?’ Wondering how long it was before she put her head to the wall for the first time wanting to see if plaster dust and breeze block could fill her belly.

‘I don’t understand it, really, not in these small places,’ says Dunwoody. ‘Why wouldn’t she just walk down the hill and ask for food? Or call the police and report a fraud? Or anything.’

Buzz says, ‘Yes, but loads of people die where you could ask the same thing. Last winter, how many thousand pensioners was it died from the cold? All they had to do was phone the gas company or speak to a neighbor, but instead they let themselves freeze. Every year, thousands of people.’

‘That’s true, but still. Why let yourself starve?’

There are a few answers to that, or none. We now know – from medical records and the documents I recovered from the cottage – that Morgan suffered a minor stroke some eight months back. She was assessed as having minor cognitive impairment, but perhaps those assessments were wrong. They sometimes are. She’d had mental-health problems too – depression, mostly – and those things might have returned. And her nearest neighbors weren’t of her kind or class. And, with the death of coal-mining in these areas, none of these communities are what they used to be. And perhaps Morgan had some strange old-fashioned pride around begging. Or thought she’d sort things out with the bank. Or suffered some further stroke. Or had some petty feud with the people in the shop or the health center. Or some combination of all these things and more.

We never finally know the truth, never learn the full map of any crime. Motivations and choices recede endlessly from view.

I don’t say this though. Just read the paperwork as the others chat. Dunwoody looks at his empty beer glass and says, ‘I’d swear I got the first round in.’

Buzz gets up to get more drinks. Breakell can’t drink – he’s driving – and I don’t.

I hold up one of the documents. A letter from social services. ‘She used to get fortnightly care visits. Someone cancelled them.’

‘Who? Morgan?’

‘Well, according to this, yes,’ I say, ‘but this letter is dated June of this year.’

Dunwoody shrugs. His face is pink and the beer has already risen to his eyes. He has a close-trimmed beard, which his mother probably thinks is strawberry-blond. To everyone else, it’s ginger.

‘Maybe Hayley Morgan wrote that letter, cancelling those visits, or maybe she didn’t. Her account was emptied about four days after this letter was sent. Stayed empty, every day after that.’

Buzz comes back with the beers. Dunwoody takes his, but his eyes are on me.

I say, ‘Hayley Morgan died because she was starving. And she was starving because she was robbed. If someone deliberately prevented care visits, in an effort to perpetuate their fraud, you could argue that that individual recklessly endangered Hayley Morgan’s life. That’s not payroll fraud. That’s manslaughter.’

Dunwoody takes the letter from me, but the letter is not the point. You need three ingredients to make up a constructive manslaughter. First, an unlawful act. Second, an act likely to cause harm to the person affected. Third, death, though neither foreseen nor intended, results. As far as I can see it, we have a big
yes
on points one and three and a slightly more doubtful
yes
to point two. The case law is mostly built on the assumption that the harm-causing act is directly physical in nature. Punching someone in the face in one notable case, or pulling a replica gun on someone with a weak heart in another.

Stealing money and cancelling visits from social workers. Could those things add up to manslaughter? I think they could.

I think they
did
.

‘I don’t know,’ says Dunwoody, ‘I’m not sure.’ But he hasn’t touched his beer and his eyes have lost some of their pinkishness. There’s anxiety there too, a rapid lateral movement of the pupils.

Which is good. If Hayley Morgan’s death was no more than a nasty accident, Dunwoody has already investigated as rigorously as anyone would expect. If we’re looking at a crime which stands only one rung down from murder, he’s been sloppy. Slow to get to the scene. Insufficient in his demand for resources. Lazy in supervision.

He pulls out his phone. No signal.

‘Sod it.’

He walks out into the car park. Buzz looks at me. This isn’t his case. He’s part amused by the scene he’s just witnessed, part keen to have the last part explained.

‘If I were him, I’d be calling my colleagues in Leicester. He should have been on their case from the start.’

Buzz rubs my back and I half close my eyes as I give myself over to the rub. Jon Breakell, feeling like a spare part probably, goes to have a pee.

‘We should go on holiday,’ Buzz says. ‘You and me. Somewhere nice.’

‘That would be nice.’

‘Get some sun.’

I nod.

‘You’ve got leave, have you?’

I stare at him. I almost never take leave. I do it only when I have to, and then never know what to do with it. That’s changed a bit since I’ve been going out with Buzz. He books holidays, makes all the arrangements, tells me what to pay him for my share. I’ve no idea how many days’ holiday I have owing. He knows that, I’m sure.

Buzz lets me hang a moment, then grins. ‘You’ve got twenty-three days, including fifteen carried over from last year, and you need to use those or you’ll lose ‘em.’

‘Oh.’

‘I thought maybe Greece? Or Turkey? Somewhere still hot enough for beaches and swimming.’

I nod. ‘That sounds …’ I’m not sure what I’m meant to say next, so just nod some more, then tuck my head against his shoulder as Jon Breakell returns.

‘I’ll make the arrangements.’

A little wriggle of emotion escapes from somewhere behind my sternum. An elusive quicksilver flash that I can’t identify and that’s out of sight before I can pin it out for examination.

I say, ‘Don’t forget my course.’

I’ve got a training course coming up. A four-week residential thing in London. Buzz says, ‘I won’t. We’ll go after that.’

His voice twists a bit as he speaks. He doesn’t like me going on the course, but doesn’t want to rehash that argument now.

Under the table, I knead his thigh.

Then the front door bangs open and Dunwoody enters. A blue twilight briefly framed behind him. Brown hills and white moths, papery in the lamplight.

‘Leicestershire police have visited the address.’ His voice is throaty. ‘A family of eight. A Mr. and Mrs. Desai, his mother and five children. The husband is a hospital porter. Wife is a stay-at-home mum. Oldest child just turned fourteen. No computer present on the property. Two phones, both seized.’

He stops. His face is still in motion, though. He’s feeling something, though I’m not sure what or how to describe it. The pressure of great things, perhaps. The responsibility and the fear.

I stretch my legs out. Pushing my toes out and down, feeling the burn in my calves and thighs. Feeling present. Happy.

‘Payroll fraud,’ I say. ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’

5.

A beautiful thing, but strange.

Krishna Desai, the hospital porter, is not our T.M. Baron. Jon and I drove out to interview him under caution. He was helpful and friendly, though not all that comfortable speaking English. He disclaimed all knowledge of a T.M. Baron, said he didn’t use a computer, but his children were taught about them at school. At the end of the interview, we asked him to fill out a short feedback form on a police website and he filled out his name slowly. He wasn’t all that familiar with the keyboard and didn’t know how to use a mouse. When it came to entering data other than his name, he looked at us, eyes asking what he was meant to do next.

The bank which gave T.M. Baron an account had a stored copy of the original ID and utility bill. Both things look authentic, but neither are. You can buy a top quality fake driving license on the web for about forty pounds. A fake utility bill comes in at around thirty pounds, less if you shop around or buy in bulk.

Baron’s account was interesting, though. He set up his account with an initial balance of a hundred pounds in late February 2010. A few weeks later, money started to flow into the account from Hayley Morgan and Adele Gibson, money whose origin we know to be fraudulent. Gibson – a woman with learning difficulties – managed her loss of income with no problems, because her care worker was more attentive, but Gibson herself is not remotely plausible as a suspect.

As for the money, every month or so, all cash in the account was transferred to a bank in Spain. We don’t yet know what happened at the Spanish end of things.

Sometime towards the end of June, however, arrangements changed. The accounts of Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan started to be stripped completely. Cleaned out. It happened a bit earlier with Morgan than with Gibson, but between the end of June and the second week of July both those accounts were drained completely. Funds no longer went to Spain, but were taken out in cash from a variety of different cashpoints ranging from Reading to Cardiff and as far west as Exeter. The total sums extracted in that way amount to around £5,600.

We’re trying to match CCTV footage against the dates and times of the cash withdrawals, but we’ve nothing useful so far. It seems like a long shot.

We’ve investigated the Cardiff store manager, the person best placed to commit the fraud, but he seems clean. His family holidayed at home this year, in an effort to save up for a kitchen extension. Not quite the behavior of a successful fraudster. We’ll continue to probe his finances – or Jon Breakell will – but the guy doesn’t seem like our man. He’s not even that bright.

We’ve looked at any business visitors to the store management team, but although there were a number – maintenance staff, haulage contractors – no one who rang alarm bells.

Social services has managed to find the letter sent by ‘Hayley Morgan’ cancelling her care visits. The paper is typed and printed on an ordinary household printer. The signature is not Hayley Morgan’s, but the forgery was close enough that social services were hardly to blame for not noticing. Morgan did not, however, possess a computer or a printer or, we think, computer skills and that was something that her care worker should have noticed. Then again, her regular care worker was going off on maternity leave and her replacement was just learning the ropes. Yes, things should have been done better but, no, nothing happened that amounted to outright negligence.

And yet: a woman died because someone snipped her lifeline. Plaster dust under her gums, rat poison in her veins.

That’s not quite how it’s seen in the office, however. The manpower shortage in the Fraud Squad has been somewhat remedied by a couple of people returning from sickness and the secondment of an inspector from Swansea. We in Major Crime still aren’t busy, except that an ugly motor accident – kids dropping stones off a motorway bridge, hitting a windscreen and triggering an eight-vehicle pile-up which killed two outright – has to be treated as a case of involuntary manslaughter, the culprits not yet identified with certainty.

And in the meantime, my little fraud inquiry, such as it was, has dwindled, the same way as Hayley Morgan’s body seemed to shrink from the first moment I found her. Investigation hasn’t ended, but it’s being pursued in a way that means it won’t ever be brought to a satisfactory close. The crime is being badged as a corporate fraud, now terminated, the culprit assumed to be living abroad.

After a tedious Monday briefing – the road accident, some boring burglaries, a dull stabbing, progress reports on some prosecution cases at least two of which I’m meant to be helping with – I pursue DCI Dennis Jackson to his office.

Jackson likes me but he doesn’t allow that to get in the way of some good old-fashioned bollockings, which he delivers with panache and conviction when the occasion warrants.

‘Good morning, Fiona. You’ve got that look.’

‘A passion for Keeping South Wales Safe,’ I say. ‘That look?’

‘You can get me a coffee, black, no sugar. I’ll give you about five minutes before I have to do some actual work.’

I go to the kitchenette and get him his coffee. Make myself peppermint tea at the same time. Return to his office. A black leatherette sofa and a sideways view out towards Bute Park.

‘Did the five minutes include making coffee? I don’t think—’

‘Fiona, let’s just see how fast we can do this, shall we? You’re going to tell me that the whoever-she-is Morgan death needs further investigation.’

‘Hayley and yes.’