The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (50 page)

So I leave. I don’t have my car with me – it’s at home – so Buzz calls a taxi for me instead. We wait, cuddling, till we get a call telling us it’s arrived.

I say, ‘Buzz, promise me you’ll seek your own happiness. Don’t let this be more than a road-bump. You deserve the best.’

He nods, but that isn’t good enough.

‘Buzz, I need you to
promise
. Get over me. Find someone else. Not straight away, but do it. Please. Promise me.’

He nods and this time it counts. We kiss each other lightly on the lips. My giddiness is so great now, I have problems with ordinary movements.

‘You’re OK, are you?’ says Buzz. ‘Sometimes those painkillers …’

‘I’m on aspirin, nothing else. And my feet are fine. It’s my head. It’s – not well. But it’s my problem. I should never have tried to make it yours.’

He walks me downstairs, an awful sadness in his step.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

I give the taxi driver my home address. He drives up into the town center then out on the Newport Road towards Eastern Avenue and Pentwyn.

My house, my life.

A world without Buzz.

I’ve got too many things in my head and I don’t know how to sort them out.

When we’re no more than a minute from home, I ask the driver to turn around. Ask him to head back in towards Cathays, to the office. The driver does as I ask. It’s been a good fare from his perspective.

I pay him and he goes.

Roll myself a cigarette and smoke it, a dark shape against the pale glass.

Then go inside and sign in. The desk officer doesn’t know who I am, doesn’t care. It’s not so usual for detectives to work through the night, but it’s not so unusual either. I left my crutches with Buzz. They’d been annoying me, a hindrance more than a help.

I take the lift up to Jackson’s floor.

Go to the cleaning cupboard opposite the lift. It’s not locked. There’s a trolley there, a good one. Different cleaning products from the ones I’m used to, but good enough. A vacuum cleaner. I drag everything out. Look for a tabard. I like those, when they fit. But there’s nothing there, so I do without. Hoover the carpets first. Long sweeps of grey, changing color slightly as I work. Do Jackson’s room with care. Move the sofa and hoover underneath. The skirting board hasn’t been touched for ages, so I sponge-wash it, scrubbing till I bring out the white. Dust the window sill. Squeegee the window. Do a careful job on the pot plant, picking off all the bits that are brown or heading that way. His keyboard is disgusting really. Needs a proper clean with the right sort of fluid, but I don’t find any in my trolley, so Jackson will just have to suffer.

I normally do a room like this in eight minutes, but because of the sofa and the skirting board, and because I took extra care with the other bits, and because my hobbled gait and painful feet make everything slower, it takes me sixteen. I do two other offices, and one set of bathrooms, the women’s ones. The longer I work, the more I relax. I would do more, but my feet won’t let me.

It’s only when I’m just about done on the bathroom that I dare to look at myself in the mirror. Look properly, I mean.

Jessica’s gone. It’s only me and my sister-Fiona here now. We’re relieved to be left alone.

I can’t quite tell what I see in our face, but it’s OK, I think. It’s scary letting go of Buzz. I know it’s the right thing to do, but it’s still a very big deal for me. Trusting that I’ll be OK on my own.

Anchored enough. Sane enough.

I give the sinks a final wipe. I like the shine of ceramics under halogen.

Put the cleaning stuff away. Call a taxi.

I’ve cleaned three offices this evening. One of those belongs to a superintendent, the recently promoted Gethin Matthews.

Before I go downstairs, I re-enter Matthews’s office. Turn on his computer. I can’t log in as him without stealing his password, and since I can’t be bothered to wait that long, I just log on using the default login details, the one any copper can use to access the basic databases. Then I go to my fake Hotmail account. Download the Trojan horse software that poor, dead Ian Shoesmith gave me. Load it onto Matthews’s computer. Close down. I feel a little ripple of Jessica-ishness rise in me as I do all that. I didn’t get on with her, but I liked her coolness. Her brassy don’t-give-a-damn quality. Enough to forgive her the odd push-up bra and questionable top.

Gareth Glyn went missing in 2002. There are, broadly speaking, three possible explanations for that. One, he just got tired of his wife and wanted to make a clean break. You don’t usually do that by simply vanishing, but still: stranger things have happened.

Two, he was indeed murdered, as his wife alleges, albeit for a crime of whistle-blowing which he committed some fifteen years earlier. Again, not obviously likely, but you can’t rule it out.

Or three, that request for information from the security services could have related to something, some current inquiry, which was threatening to resurrect the ghosts of the past. Ghosts that might have called for Glyn to have entered a witness protection service.

There isn’t, as of 2012, a single systematic witness protection service covering the whole of Britain, but there have always been local programs, administered by each regional police force. As superintendent, Gethin Matthews will have access to all that information. He’ll be able to request further data without arousing suspicion. And now, thanks to the software I’ve planted,
I’ll
be able to send that request on his behalf. I’ll be able to monitor the reply, delete it once I’ve read it, and will be able to do all that remotely, from my own computer. From home, or anywhere else.

If it comes to that, I’ll be able to access any information that a superintendent can command. Which is a lot.

It’s a nice feeling.

I won’t rush into anything. I need to get my own head straightened out before I plunge into all that again. But that sense of gathering excitement which came to me that day in Hayley Morgan’s cottage is here again with me now. Here, amongst these neatly hoovered floors, these tidily dusted surfaces.

Fiona Grey came to be a pretty damn good cleaner, I reflect, but her partner, Miss Griffiths, is a pretty useful investigator. Somewhere down that Gareth Glynian road lies a clue which will take me closer to my biggest and most urgent mystery. The mystery of me.

A different taxi takes me home.

Magnolia paint. Stainless steel kitchen. A garden that is a blank strip of nothing. A living room without decoration.

My house. My home. Even Fiona Grey had more care for her interiors than this.

I walk around my living room and kitchen. Feeling things. Opening doors and closing them. Feeling the presence of what used to be my life. A castaway on the shores of normal.

I don’t feel sleepy, though it’s now very late. But I act as though I am. Brush my teeth. Take off my clothes. Look at the dressings still oozing blood on my feet. Put on a nightie, a scoop-necked thing with a blue bow and a pattern of tiny blue flowers. Like bilberry flowers, I think. Tiny bells.

I’m intensely aware of the lack of surveillance. No video, no audio. I walk past power sockets in my underwear weirded out by the realization that no one is watching.

And I realize that Fiona Grey is not dead. An undercover identity is never ended. It survives the operation, ready to be used again. I don’t need her now and she doesn’t need me, but if life gets challenging for me, Fiona Griffiths, I can always walk into the hostel again. Play table football with Clementina, stand outside and smoke ciggies with Gary.

I think too of the wedding dress I almost bought. Glossy stripes and a nipped-in waist. I wanted to be that person. The one who could have worn that wedding dress with authenticity. With a sense of belonging. I wanted that more than almost anything.

I hope Buzz finds happiness.

I hope I do too.

I make a cup of peppermint tea, plump up my pillows, and turn out the light.

THE END

Afterword

This book is a fiction, of course, but one which rests on some firmly factual footings.

The life of the undercover police officer is often as remarkable – and as dangerous – as I’ve portrayed it. It’s true, for example, that the undercover training course is the hardest offered by any British police service. True too that the vast majority of applicants fail. Also true that undercover officers receive no huge overtime payments, no vast bonuses to make up for the fact that their old life disappears, that their family ties are severed, almost completely. It’s also not my invention that a legend is for ever: the bad guys don’t go away just because you happen to have completed an assignment. The fear lives on.

As for the technology in this book – all that audio and video bugging, the transmitters and the RF scanners – they’re all real too, and not just real, but very cheap. If you want to buy a voice-activated bugging device that looks like (and is) an ordinary power socket, it’ll set you back about fifty pounds, about eighty bucks. Pens that record, little magnetic gizmos that track cars, RF scanners that find them – you’ll find all these things sold by the bigger online stores, and at prices that are scarily affordable. In this new dawn of surveillance, no one ever knows if they’re safe.

Furthermore, many of the specific incidents in the book were informed by my conversations with former undercover officers or those that managed them. When, for example, Brattenbury decides to ‘arrest’ Fiona as a way of removing her from the enquiry, he was simply doing what countless other police officers have done in real life. When Anna Quintrell makes a long and detailed confession to her cellmate, her mistake is one that countless other criminals have made in the past. Even that final journey to the farmhouse: the way that Henderson eliminated aerial pursuit came straight from an account given to me by a recently serving police officer. If it seems ungenerous of me not to name those people who have helped me – well, they would prefer to remain in the shadows. My thanks to them anyway. This book owes them, big time.

Two last things.

First, the British press has been rightly critical of certain recent undercover operations, which were poorly targeted and slackly managed. But those operations were not typical. Most undercover enquiries are aimed at infiltrating and breaking some deeply unpleasant organizations: criminal gangs who use intimidation and violence as a routine part of their trade. Those gangs need to be destroyed and their senior officers arrested and convicted. The burden of achieving that – and achieving that by lawful means – falls, to a disproportionate extent, on a small group of astonishingly brave officers whose exploits will never, and can never, gain public recognition. We all owe them, however. Our streets are safer because of their commitment and courage.

And second: thank
you
. Thank you for reading this book to the end. Thank you for sharing Fiona’s journey. Thank you for making it possible for me to do this job that I love. And if you would like to continue watching Fiona’s progress, she and I would both be delighted if you did. You can
sign up to my mailing list here
, and I’ll ping you an email to let you know when I’ve got a new book coming out. I’ll treat your email address with as much respect as I would my own: I won’t give it to anyone else; I won’t send you a ton of junk; and I’ll make it incredibly easy to unsubscribe should you wish to.

Finally, if you’re curious to know a little about
This Thing of Darkness
– Fiona’s fourth excursion – well, I won’t say much, but I will say that she has a
very
tough time at one point, her toughest test so far. And if you happen to have a boat you’re fond of, then may I strongly advise that you keep Miss Griffiths well away from it? She’s a dangerous lady and not to be trusted.

Harry

Oxfordshire, England

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About Harry (the 25 word bio)

Forty-something. Married. British. Kids. Living in Oxfordshire. Runs The Writers' Workshop. Used to be a banker. Now a full-time writer. Likes rock-climbing, walking, swimming. Done.

If you want more (and you really don’t), you can get it
here
.

The Fiona Griffiths series in full

Talking to the Dead (D.C. Fiona Griffiths #1)

Love Story, with Murders (D.C. Fiona Griffiths #2)

The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (D.C. Fiona Griffiths #3) –
that’s this book!

This Thing of Darkness (D.C. Fiona Griffiths #4) –
issued July 2015

Please tell me when your next book is coming out
.

Dedication

To my beloved N., as ever

‘The hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.’