The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (37 page)

I don’t quite let her do that. I mostly let her have her way with clothes – a leopard-print top, a push-up bra, a pair of wet-look leggings – but I generally insist on slouch boots, loose but concealing around the ankle. My body, my rules.

Of course there are times when Jessica rebels. Does what she wants, dresses as she chooses. Other times when I assert control. Make her dress down. Even force her into a bookshop now and again. The Waterstones on the Hayes. The little bookshop on Wellfield Road, where I search for cheap editions of the classics and Jessica flips through anything with pictures.

We get along. Not friends, but ill-assorted housemates carefully negotiating our shared social space.

I say to Henderson, ‘If the police take me in, they’ll find the bracelet.’

‘Yes.’

‘It won’t take them long to realize I’m Fiona Grey.’

‘No.’

‘They have my DNA. And my fingerprints. And …’

Henderson says, tautly, ‘The bracelet is for our protection, not yours. If they take you into a police station, we’ll know that they’ve done so. If they talk to you, and don’t wipe the recording, we’ll hear what they’ve been saying. If they talk to you and
do
wipe the recording, we’ll know that they’ve done so. That’s what we’ll check for. Every day. Is there twenty-four hours of material there? Does any of it suggest a police approach?’

I don’t say anything, but Jessica and my two Fionas share a common view of this approach to our welfare and I expect my face expresses that view.

Henderson says, ‘Fiona, if the police approach you, we have a problem. We do. You do. Your job will be to say absolutely nothing and we’ll work, as we did before, through a lawyer. There’s nothing illegal about changing your look. Nothing illegal about wearing an ankle bracelet, if it comes to that. Stick with us and we’ll stick with you.’

I shrug. At this point, in any event, I have no choice at all.

And there are other gains, besides.

Henderson has put me into a one-bedroom flat down on the Bay. It’s bland and boxy. Street view not sea-view. First floor not penthouse. But still. It is, by most standards, the smartest accommodation I’ve had all year. Fiona and I don’t really like it, but we recognize that Henderson meant well. He was even nice enough to tell the truth. ‘We’ve got audio and video feeds from the apartment. Audio only in the bathroom, so if you prefer to get changed there, you should feel free.’

I say thank you, but my thanks are not effusive.

The kitchen has nothing in it except an unopened box of cheap crockery from Argos. A box of cutlery. Some glasses. And a salt carton. ‘Everyone needs salt,’ says Henderson.

Nor is it just my accommodation that gets an upgrade. My education does too.

Henderson takes me to spend a long day with Ian Shoesmith in London, learning how to hack computers: a new skill, another gain.

What’s remarkable, really, is how simple it is. You think these things must be complicated, but they’re not, they’re really not. My first step – Jessica’s first step – will be to obtain the necessary passwords. So we simply place a keystroke recorder on the back of the relevant computers, something so easy I did it once myself on another case altogether, and wait for those recorders to collect the user’s passwords. Then, the next day or the next week, depending on my cleaning schedule, I use those passwords to place a little bit of software on the relevant computer. The software is, I think, just a classier version of the Trojan horse software that Kureishi once used. You can buy commercial versions of the same thing easily enough, the only real difference being that the commercial versions let you know they’re there.

Indeed, although my training day was long – ten hours all told, plus a good six hours of travel – the essence was simple: steal some passwords, load some software. The whole thing only took as long as it did because Shoesmith made me practice on a whole variety of computers, configured with multiple different operating systems, firewalls, and security set-ups. By the time we’d finished, I was as quick and as certain as Shoesmith himself. That’s not a boast, or not really. The process just isn’t that hard.

At the end of the day, I asked Shoesmith if I could have a copy of the software. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Just because,’ and he said, ‘OK.’ So I set up a Hotmail account under a false name and emailed myself a copy of the software. I don’t really know why I wanted it, even. It’s just the sort of thing I prefer to have.

Another gain.

These gains and losses are bewildering at some level, but the Fiona Griffiths me understands it all. Predicted it all, indeed.

Simply put: Tinker needs me, three times over. First, because I’m still the only payroll clerk they have. The only person who knows how a payroll department actually operates. Secondly, they’ve lost Quintrell. Her precise accountancy view of payroll isn’t quite the perspective I bring, but they still need someone who can look at a pay slip and tell them if the National Insurance has been calculated correctly. And then, third, there’s my role as cleaner. The role I now share with Jessica. My ability to get into corporate premises. To get up close and personal with the computers that matter.

But I’m not an easy hire. Uppermost in Henderson’s mind is the fact that Fiona Grey is now known to the police and dancing round a fraud charge, at that.

And that’s their dilemma. Tinker wants Fiona Grey’s expertise and access, but they’re worried by the risk of contamination. I’m simultaneously essential and potentially lethal.

The solution that Henderson and his buddies came up with was to create a new girl in the mold of the old one. Hence Jessica Taylor’s arrival: a clean identity, a woman without a past. Hence also the need for the costume, hair and make-up changes. Henderson coaches me to speak differently, walk differently, act differently. He wants Jessica’s new ‘clean’ identity to belong to someone who isn’t even recognizable as the old Fiona Grey. Her polar opposite.

And I think she is. I mean, yes, Buzz would recognize me if ‘Jessica’ spent time with him, but I’m sure that if I passed him on the street, he’d never notice me in her. Lowri, who I still bump into now and again, is a self-absorbed cow admittedly, the only real hold-over from my old life, but she’s not shown the slightest surprise or curiosity when she sees me. Just tells me about her allergies with the same wearisome from-the-top approach she adopted the first time she met Fiona Grey. I try to make Jessica louder, brassier, less pliable with Lowri than I do elsewhere – I try to make her character consistent with her clothes, her look, her make-up – but I genuinely wonder if I need to make the effort. To Lowri, I’m just another girl.

Henderson is right, of course. Given his role and his objectives, he’s doing everything right. The way I’d do it, if I were him.

But while I
understand
all this – and had assumed myself ready to accept the new conditions of this undercover life – I find myself taken aback by the reality. I’d found it easy enough to become Fiona Grey. More than that: I enjoyed the change, found it simpler.

But this Jessica Taylor: I don’t relate to her. Not to her looks, her confidence, her outward brightness. If my head was less muddled, I’d handle these things better. I’d be brassy, mouthy Jessica when I had to be – with Lowri and the other cleaning girls, or when out in town – and myself the rest of the time. Henderson only cares about the public performance. He doesn’t care who I am in private.

But I’m not that fixed, that centered. When my air bubble floats into Jessica’s world, I end up becoming her, because I’m not sure who else or how else to be. I bounce between my different identities, trying not to say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and all the time feeling my head degrading. A pellet of uranium 235, spitting alpha particles. Teetering on the brink of collapse or ignition.

It’s at home when these things are at their worst. When I’m getting ready for bed, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I sometimes don’t know who I am. I try to remember my name, my real one. Try to remember anything: about Buzz, Jackson, Brattenbury, my family.

I usually get there, sort of. An accumulation of scraps: some names, a few images, a memory of past kindness. But nothing that really joins up. Nothing that lies in a straight line between actual people and me. And whenever I almost get something, the blonde girl in the mirror shakes her head at me and the surface of the pond breaks again and I end up with nothing but confusion and a pocket full of scraps.

And sometimes I get really, properly lost. End up sitting on the bathroom floor to avoid the girl in the mirror. Sometimes go to sleep there, or think I do.

Once, when I think I was very lost, Henderson phoned me. I was lying on the bathroom floor and had been there I don’t know how long.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you want me to come over?’

‘No.’

There’s a pause. I have the hallucination that Hayley Morgan is in the bathroom with me. I know she’s dead and I think I might be too. I think I was probably asleep when Henderson rang, so this isn’t quite like a full-blown psychosis. More like one of those things where it takes time to recover fully into wakefulness.

‘You’ve been in the bathroom two hours.’

‘It’s the only place you don’t spy on me.’

He says something about the need to protect Jessica from police intervention. How my interests are protected by all this.

I don’t know what that means. My hips are hurting from lying too long on a tiled floor.

‘Can you take the camera out of the bedroom?’

‘OK. I’ll do that tomorrow.’ There’s a pause on the line. A softly crackling emptiness. ‘No, cancel that. I’ll come over now.’

I don’t know what I say to that, if anything, but the line goes dead. I sit on the bathroom floor and count my breaths.
In
-two-three-four-five.
Out
-two-three-four-five.

Some time later, it doesn’t seem that long, Henderson arrives. He opens the bathroom door, appraises me a moment.

Disappears. Comes back in a few minutes. Has a little piece of electronics in his hand.

‘This is the video camera from the bedroom.’ He drops it by the sink. It’s tiny: these things come very small these days.

I think he expects me to stand up, but I don’t. He slides down beside me. Takes my hand.

‘Finding this hard, eh?’ he says.

‘Are you alive?’

‘Am I
alive
? Yes.’

‘And I am? I mean, you
think
I am?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘What’s my name?’

‘Your real name? Fiona Grey. At the moment, you’re pretending to be someone called Jessica Taylor, but that’s just a temporary thing. You’re still Fiona Grey underneath.’

‘Am I getting married?’

‘Getting married? No. Not as far as I know.’

‘Who’s in this bathroom?’

‘Right now? You and me.’

‘You haven’t looked.’

Henderson makes a show of looking. The bathroom is tiny, so I suppose his initial estimate was always likely to be accurate. But he confirms it: ‘Just you and me. I’ve checked.’

His words give me the confidence to look around. And he’s right. I can’t see Hayley Morgan anywhere on the floor and even she wouldn’t be small enough to fit in the cupboards. ‘Sorry. I thought there was someone else.’

‘No. Just us.’

He starts saying some other things, but it all feels very complicated and I don’t listen.

I don’t know why he uses so many words.

After a bit, he stops talking and lifts me up and carries me through to the bedroom. The blonde girl, Jessica, stares at me from the bedroom mirror and I want to go back into the bathroom, but when Henderson works out what’s bothering me, he lifts the mirror down and places it, glass side inward, against the wall.

I look around cautiously. Say, ‘Is she here? The blonde one?’

Henderson starts to say one thing, then sees my face and says, ‘No. It’s just you. You’re Fiona Grey. The only people in this room are you and me. Nobody else.’

‘And you’re alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I am?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. I’m sure.’

I get into bed then. Don’t get changed with Henderson there, but do what I need to do. He tucks me in. Helps me with pillows. He rubs my shoulder in a nice way, and I can feel that his hand is definitely warm, which means he
is
alive and, in that case, I probably am too. I almost ask him to kiss me. Not because I want his kisses exactly, just that all that warmth and activity would be the best possible kind of proof.

But I don’t ask.

He sits there holding my hand and I start to feel more normal.

‘Sorry, Vic. My head. It doesn’t always work brilliantly. It goes funny sometimes.’

I point at my head, in case he has trouble locating it.

‘You’re doing fine. It’s not for long.’

At some stage, I go to sleep. At some stage, Henderson leaves.

In the morning, I see him again. Fiona Grey is still on police bail and she has to report every week to the police station down on the bay. This is my first time doing that since I dyed my hair. When Henderson enters my flat, he’s worried that I’m still crazy. But I’m not. I’m feeling OK.

He gives me – gives Jessica – a wig that’s more or less Fiona Grey-ish. I tuck my blond pixie-locks under the wig, dress soberly in what I have left of my old clothes, and present myself for Henderson’s inspection.

‘The old Fiona. Welcome back.’ He looks me over. ‘You’re all right, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘After last night, I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bit weird that.’

‘For you, maybe. I’m like that sometimes.’ I shrug. ‘It comes and goes.’

The truth, more or less.

He checks my ankle for the presence of the bracelet, checks the battery level, then drives me down to the station, parking a few hundred yards away.

I put my handle on the car door, but don’t yet get out.

‘Vic?’

‘Yes?’

‘Last night. That sort of thing used to happen more. I’m OK now mostly, but I’m under a lot of pressure.’