The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (31 page)

And finally, of course, the barn itself. When I paced up and down, I made careful measurements of both the main barn itself and the side buildings which housed our bedrooms and the common room. I give the measurements as accurately as I can. Draw it out. ‘The renovation is fairly recent and expensive. Assuming they applied for planning permission, the application should be traceable. And if not – well, we can always go back over aerial images.’

Jackson and the others scribble furiously all through this. Jackson tells me that they’re already asking Gap head office for store by store sales data. I ask how many stores they have in South Wales.

‘Outside Cardiff? Not many. Ebbw Vale. Bridgend.’

I say, ‘Try Ebbw. I think we were in the mountains. No lights. Minimal traffic. No planes. Nightjars. At least one or two steep ascents. I also think the telecoms tower was on elevated ground. There were trees between me and it, but its topmost lamp rose clear of the leaves. If we were in the mountains, it wouldn’t make sense for someone to drive to Cardiff or Bridgend.’

‘Good. We’ll call Ebbw direct.’

There’s a bit more discussion. Ryan is a bit negative on the fibers I collected from the car. He says you have two or three big carpet manufacturers who supply all the big car companies. We spiral off into technicalities.

I say, ‘Look, I think we should have a little police brutality, if you don’t mind.’

Jackson and Brattenbury exchange a look. Susan Knowles covers her mouth.

Jackson starts to talk, but I interrupt.

‘Look, you’re going to put me in a cell with Anna Quintrell, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So let me look the part, the way she imagines it, anyway. She’s already seen me in handcuffs. We may as well add some color. We want her to unload.’

‘You’ve already taken a knock or two from when they brought you in.’

‘Yes, but …’ I shrug. I saw myself in the mirror when I was getting my medical inspection. A knock or two. No big deal.

Brattenbury says, ‘Look, Fiona, I appreciate your—’

Jackson says, ‘Actually, Adrian, I agree with Fiona here. Mervyn, this is your field of expertise, I believe.’

Rogers grins at me and says, ‘I thought I’d never get the chance.’ He leaves the room.

I eat some lasagna, which is now cold.

Brattenbury says, ‘Fiona, this is remarkable work. You—’

Jackson interrupts him. ‘Don’t flatter her. She’ll cock everything up. Or start shooting people.’

Rogers comes back into the room with a wooden hockey stick. I view it with some alarm. I do vaguely remember that one of Buzz’s hockey team-mates works in the custody suite, but when I suggested police brutality, I wasn’t thinking of this exactly. And Rogers looks like a man who knows how to use a hockey stick. Except maybe when it comes to hitting hockey balls.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says cheerfully. ‘This looks worse than it is. Here, take these.’ He gives me some aspirin. ‘Reduces pain, increases bruising.’

I’ve already had as many aspirin as I’m meant to take, but I crunch up what he gives me and swallow the dust with some cold tea.

‘Give it twenty minutes,’ Rogers advises.

Jackson nods. Says, ‘This farmhouse, wherever it is. You think Roy Williams is there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any actual evidence?’

‘No. But they’ve taken acute care to protect the place. Roy Williams will be a prize asset for them. Why give yourself two locations to worry about when you could focus on a single site?’

A bit of chat about that too. The consensus agrees with my verdict.

I ask if they’ve found anything out about Henderson’s alternative health place. Brattenbury would have gone mental at me if I’d told him about Gary, so I just said Henderson happened to mention the place in passing.

‘We’ll have a video on the relevant doorway later today. It seems Henderson sees an osteopath most weeks. He doesn’t always make it, but pays whether he comes or not. The osteopath seems for real. Getting an interception warrant for the osteopath’s room, though. That could be hard.’

An understatement, I would think. Our reasons for suspicion are highly circumstantial and bugging a quasi-medical practice with the attendant ‘collateral infringement of privacy’ will be a hard sell, even for SOCA.

Brattenbury and Jackson both take calls, receive texts, confer with colleagues. Brattenbury is in charge of the operation overall, but most of the manpower is now coming from Jackson’s team and command seems about equally shared to me. Plus Roy Williams is Jackson’s man, not Brattenbury’s. And it’s more than just a chain-of-command issue for Jackson. He was a guest at Roy and Katie’s wedding. I saw the pictures.

It’s been twenty minutes, or a little more.

‘OK,’ Rogers says. ‘Stand up. There, yes, like that.’

I stand. He places the hockey stick upright, so it touches the bone above and below my right eye socket. Jackson gets into position behind me. Susan Knowles is staring at us, like we’re a collection of savages.

‘Short, sharp knock,’ says Rogers. ‘Close your eyes. On three.’

He hits me on
two
. Doesn’t move the stick, just slams it hard and sharp with his hand. I feel a fierce blow on my skull, but it’s shocking more than actually painful. Like a sudden bolt of blackness, shot through with stars.

I fall over. Jackson catches me. Slides me sideways into a chair.

I put my hand to my face. Feel a lump already starting to rise. Skin and muscles starting to rise and thicken, obedient to a new physiognomy.

‘Ow!’

Rogers inspects his handiwork and grins. ‘It’s coming up lovely.’ To Susan Knowles’s appalled face, he adds, ‘Trained as a sports physio once upon a time. Amazing the things you learn.’

I ask for peppermint tea. Then there’s a bit where we all just sit around and drink tea and eat cake.

I say to Brattenbury, ‘You’ll have to take me to Manchester, of course?’

‘Yes.’

To Jackson: ‘Is there any way you could arrange—’

‘Already done. Your young man will be in Manchester. We’ll give you as much time together as we can arrange. Make the most of it.’ His face shifts a little and he adds, ‘These long assignments. They get to anyone. It can take time to settle back into normal.’

I realize that my apartment would have been under surveillance from the moment that Roy Williams was reported missing. Someone would have seen Henderson kiss his fingers and touch them to my lips. Seen that and reported it, but Jackson is too wise an owl to let the matter go any further.

I also realize that from Jackson’s perspective and from Brattenbury’s this whole arrest process is a way to get me out from active undercover work. They couldn’t simply withdraw me: that would flag me up as a spy to Henderson and his buddies. A big, loud, public arrest is probably the single most common way of withdrawing an undercover officer from duty. From their point of view, Fiona Grey has just about reached the end of her useful life.

I eat more cake, but I’m getting fidgety. I’m not sure that I want to stop being Fiona Grey.

I say, ‘The cell I’m in. Can you make it as cold as possible? I want a rough night.’

Rogers goes off to sort something out.

I ask about Quintrell. How her interrogation has gone so far. Jackson pulls in Jane Alexander, who’s been leading the interviews. Jane is a friend, sort of, and she stares at my face, the obvious question on her lips.

I tell her that I answered back to DCI Jackson. ‘Big mistake,’ I say.

My mouth is stiff on the left, because the bruising reaches down to my cheek. When I smile, I smile with one side only.

Alexander darts me a look that’s a mixture of things: polite smile, alarm, professionalism and something else. Respect, or something like it. She has an exaggerated view of my abilities and is perhaps a little scared by my oddity.

But she collects herself. Summarizes things with swift brevity. Quintrell is so frightened of what Henderson might do to her that she’s revealed nothing. She’s heard the audio recordings made at her house. She knows she’s going to jail. Knows that the only way to reduce her sentence is to cooperate. But she has still said nothing, other than answer a few basic questions about name and identity.

I say, ‘Keep going. Make it long. Make it hard.’

Alexander nods. She’ll do turn and turn about with a colleague, for most of the evening if necessary.

I stand up, ready to be taken to my cell.

Brattenbury stands too. ‘Good luck, Fiona. Anything you can get.’

A custody officer comes to the door. No one has told the staff here that I’m a police officer, but when an interview room is stuffed with senior officers and chocolate cake, it’s fairly obvious that I’m not a regular criminal.

The officer looks at my face. Under ordinary circumstances, he’d file a report. Cardiff isn’t the sort of place where suspects get beaten up in underground rooms. But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. Jackson says to leave it. I say so too. The officer tells Jackson he’ll need to report the matter to the custody sergeant – the right response – and escorts me to my cell.

Two beds. Thin blue mattresses laid over concrete. Blankets. An all-in-one metal loo and washbasin, which sounds odd but looks practical. A concrete shelf which doubles as a table.

There’s light, but no window. Home Office guidelines require that prisoners can tell the difference between night and day, so the Cardiff suite was built with solar tubes that extend as much as twenty meters down from the roof. A panel in the ceiling releases a weird, luminous glow. Cold air blows from some vent.

The guard says, ‘All right,’ and closes the door. Steel door, painted blue.

I’m all alone. Somewhere, invisibly, a microphone gathers the silence.

37.

Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutesy little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

We stare at each other.

She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

I give her one.

‘And another?’

I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

‘So am I.’

I shrug. Not interested.

There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

I shrug.

Light dies in the ceiling.

She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

I sleep.

38.

Sleep and eventually wake.

Light glows from the ceiling. A prison dawn.

Quintrell doesn’t look like she’s slept much. She’s propped against the wall. Blanket doubled up over her legs. She’s staring at me. Her skin looks blue.

I don’t have my watch – it was removed at processing – but Quintrell has hers. I ask her the time.

‘Coming up to five o’clock.’

‘Thanks.’

I rinse my mouth in the little metal basin. Drink a bit.

My headache comes back and I want aspirin. Could ask for some, in fact – the custody staff would bring them – but I don’t want the intrusion.

Sit back down on my bed, look at Quintrell.

She says, ‘You should report them.’ She means the bruising on my face.

‘That’d work well.’

Quintrell trusts my legend completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

‘Thanks.’

She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks.’

Silence fills the cell.

Silence, and that eerie light which seems unconnected to any sun.

‘Is this your first time? You know: in prison.’

I say, ‘This isn’t prison. Prison’s worse.’ Then after a bit, I add, ‘There was stuff in Manchester. I’ve never been in for long.’

‘The policewoman yesterday told me that I could get ten years.’ She starts to cry again.

I watch her with interest. Envy, actually. I’ve only cried once in my adult life. I want to ask her the secret. What interior handbrake has to be released.

‘There was one guy, Somebody Scragg, who got seventeen years. For fraud. They showed me the reports.’

I say, ‘They showed them to me too. I don’t think we’ll get seventeen years.’

More crying.

Light strengthens in the ceiling. Down the hall, we hear a prisoner – mentally ill, almost certainly – shout and bang in his cell. Down the corridor, a movement of men.

‘I’ve got a daughter, you know.’

‘Have you?’

That’s news to me. No glimpse of it in Quintrell’s life so far. Nothing on the Tinker records. Brattenbury didn’t know it. Jackson didn’t. Jane Alexander didn’t know it when she was interviewing.

‘I was very young when I had her. Seventeen. When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t coping so well with things and gave her up for adoption. She’s eighteen now. We were just starting to get to know each other again.’