The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (8 page)

By the time I return, all is sweetness and light.

Jackson, Adams, Widdicombe, Brattenbury and Widdicombe’s gopher are standing by the conference room window getting a guided tour of central Cardiff from Jackson’s stabbing index finger. I’m not welcome on his tour bus. ‘OK, Fiona, thank you,’ meaning that my services are no longer required.

I leave.

And that’s it. I hear nothing further. As I understand things, Mick Adams from our Fraud Squad is seconded to the SOCA inquiry. Presumably someone of similar rank from Devon and Cornwall. Presumably Jackson and Widdicombe get what they need. But nothing filters down to me.

I’m only partly sorry. Whatever else this case may be, it’s going to involve a lot of complex computer analysis, a lot of painstaking financial audits. That kind of work is tailor-made for SOCA – they inherited the whole of what used to be the National Hi-tech Crime Unit and they have forensic financial skills second only to those of the SFO. And none of that appeals to me. Much as I relish Kureishi’s exsanguinated corpse, much as I like the odor of organized crime that floats over the entire investigation, I’m not interested in computers or financial accounts. I like the objects of the inquiry, but not its probable methods. I go back to my busy little detective constable life, being given orders by people I don’t always respect, executing those orders, writing up a completed action report and repeating the process. We have no interesting murders in stock at the moment, but we have our normal helping of assault, rape and violent stupidity. It’s a thin diet, but I get by.

The one real highlight: I point out an anomaly in the case so far to Dennis Jackson. The superstore fraud involved two unwitting accomplices: Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan. They were excellent choices for the fraud in one way, because they were real people, with real addresses. The audit software used to detect payroll frauds would never have flashed an alert faced with these names.

Yet, I don’t think the names were chosen by accident. Hayley Morgan was an isolated stroke victim with some cognitive impairments. Adele Gibson is learning impaired and relies on a social worker for help with basic household finance and the like. People like that don’t always have the tools needed to challenge strange behavior in their finances – and until the last few months, they hadn’t actually been made any worse off by the scam. They were carefully chosen targets. Chosen by someone in a position to pick.

I nudge Jackson. He nudges the Fraud Squad. They discover that Sajid Kureishi’s sister-in-law, Razia Riaz, worked as a receptionist at Cardiff Social Care Services in Grangetown. Discover that she had interfered with the flow of correspondence in order to keep care workers in the dark.

She’s arrested and charged with fraud. Under interrogation, she admitted that she had, a year and a half back, obtained the signatures needed from Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan to gain access to their bank accounts. I wasn’t present at the arrest or the interrogation, but Gethin Stephens, the new Fraud Squad DI, told me that she was a nasty piece of work, venomous and vindictive, and with no apparent remorse for the consequences of her actions.

The CPS are considering a manslaughter charge and I hope they go ahead.

And that’s the story as we now have it. Kureishi found a way to penetrate corporate computers. His sister-in-law found a way to generate appropriate payroll dummies for the fraud. The pair of them obtained some false identity documents and set up a bank account which they used to channel their money. The first of them is dead, the second awaiting prosecution. We don’t know quite why Kureishi went on the run and probably never will, but he must have got scared that his partners in organized crime were getting tired of him. He stole what he could. Ran when he could. And got killed anyway.

That’s all I really know. I do my regular work and try to remember that I have a life.

When Buzz asks if I have a swimsuit, I say I have no swimsuits but two bikinis. He asks if my passport is valid. I say that I’ve checked and it is.

And strange to say, I find I’m excited by the prospect of holiday. I’ve never felt that before. I’ve normally avoided holiday completely or approached it with a kind of anxiety. But this feels different. And when Buzz says, ‘Are you looking forward to it?’, I say, ‘I am, I really am.’ When he laughs at me, I laugh too.

12.

Wednesday 9 November
. Two weeks and two days before Buzz and I fly out to Miami. I get a call from Jackson.

‘Do you have a minute?’ he says. He speaks with an unusual gentleness, the way he might if I actually had a choice.

I go up. His office: a large, black leatherette sofa, a couple of art prints on the wall, one of those pointless office plants – a stringy palmate thing, that sits in a ceramic pot full of what looks like ceramic gravel.

On the sofa, Brattenbury, wearing a dark jacket over a plum-colored V-neck. He looks cooler than coppers are meant to look. Makes Jackson look older and tireder than he really is.

I sit down.

‘Fiona, you remember Adrian Brattenbury. He’s the Senior Investigating Officer on Operation Tinker.’

‘
Tinker?
’

Brattenbury says, ‘The computer allocates names. We don’t pick ‘em.’

‘Adrian, if you want to give Fiona a quick overview.’

There’s a smoked glass coffee table in front of the sofa. Papers on it, including some six by ten photo sheets, but turned so I can’t see them.

Brattenbury nods, but first looks straight at me and says, ‘Nice to meet you properly. I understand Dennis here has a lot of faith in you.’

I don’t know what to say to that, so I just sit. When Brattenbury figures out that I’m not going to say anything, he continues, ‘Tinker. It’s turning into a biggie. Thanks to your work in identifying Kureishi, we’ve been able to trace nine different frauds, eight of those payroll-related. One of them an expense-based thing: the same, but different. Total
monthly
amount stolen is in excess of a quarter of a million pounds. At the current rate, about three point eight million a year.’

Perhaps I look surprised, because he adds, ‘We haven’t closed anything down. Not yet. If we do, our chances of securing convictions on the perpetrators fall to about zero. These are big companies for the most part and most of them have an existing policy of cooperating with police investigation. Those that don’t – well, they’re on board for now. How long that goes on for, I don’t know. But for the time being, we’re OK.’

He waits to see if I want to say something, but I still don’t, so he continues, ‘It looks like the basic mechanics of the fraud were initially set up by Kureishi. He installed software that gave external access to payroll. We’re confident he was not the ultimate beneficiary of the fraud. We simply can’t find enough money or signs of heavy spending. And the set-up looks remarkably professional. The fraud involves over a hundred and fifty dummy UK bank accounts. The money siphons via Spain, Portugal or Jersey to Belize. The Belize bank account is fronted by nominees and owned by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. That shell company in turn is owned by a foundation in Panama. We’ve got the best investigators we have trying to crack that little nut open, but frankly our chances are very low. And even if we peel things back to Panama, they’ll quite likely just pull the money back through a whole lot of anonymous shell companies, through difficult or corrupt jurisdictions, and we’ll get nowhere at all.’

It occurs to me that Jersey and the British Virgin Islands are both under the jurisdiction of the British government, and that the Queen is head of state in Belize. It also occurs to me that making these places world centers for shell companies, nominee accounts, loosely controlled money and zero corporate taxation is not necessarily consistent with what our government is there to do.

I don’t say this, though. Just sit there and try to look intelligent.

Brattenbury continues. ‘Our assumption is that even if Kureishi originated the fraud, he lost control of it to criminals with far more extensive resources and experience. Kureishi got greedy or had some falling-out with his employers. They handled that the way these guys tend to do. Our primary investigative goal is therefore to find the ultimate controllers of this fraud and to bring them to justice. Charges of fraud and murder.’

I nod. I still don’t know why I’m here, except that I think I do.

I keep looking at the six by tens.

I am feeling something. A cold distance that comes between me and my body, a band of December fog. I normally like to pursue these feelings, to see if I can understand and name them, but the time and place for that exercise is not now. Not now and not here.

‘Your furniture superstore,’ says Brattenbury. ‘That was the smallest fraud, the earliest, and the least sophisticated. I think you’d call it a proof of concept test. They’ve been building from there. The current frauds, the larger ones, are built on a much larger scale and need more … more care and attention.’

I nod. Keep looking at the pictures. Keep feeling that December fog.

‘With the bigger companies, backdoor access to a single computer terminal doesn’t give the fraudsters what they need. They need someone onsite as well. Basically, they use that initial opening to design the fraud. To figure out the company’s systems, how to get around the safeguards. Then, when they’ve figured out a scam that will work, they recruit a mole within the company. The mole executes the plan and monitors it.’

I say, or try to say, ‘A payroll clerk, someone like that,’ but no words seem to come out, so I clear my throat and try again.

‘Yes, exactly,’ he says when he understands me. ‘Exactly.’

He goes on talking. The current plan is to terminate most of the frauds in what Brattenbury calls a ‘natural’ way. Basically, he intends to nudge the companies’ internal auditors to make the checks that will expose the fraud, seemingly as part of the company’s regular audit process.

‘We do, however, want to leave two or three of the bigger scams running. We don’t want the perpetrators to feel they’ve been found out. Luckily, the two biggest scams affect insurance companies, both of whom pay out tens of millions of pounds annually as a result of organized crime, so they’re particularly keen to be helpful. They’ve given us as much systems access as we need. We can see literally every single keystroke, every mouse click on the relevant computers.’

I nod. I’m not particularly good with computers, but I know these things aren’t particularly difficult. You can get remote monitoring software for twenty or thirty pounds online. If the corporate’s IT staff are being helpful, you can probably achieve the same effect by tweaking a few settings on some admin panel.

I also know, though, that you don’t break organized crime syndicates by computer monitoring alone.

‘We have identified the local moles. That’s not hard, as you know. But we don’t want the moles, we want the people controlling them. And the people profiting from them. And we’ve got nowhere. Nowhere at all. We haven’t closed with the enemy because, the truth is, we’ve no idea
who
the enemy is.’

I nod. I don’t seem to have a working voice box, so I stop trying to use it.

‘Infiltration,’ says Brattenbury. ‘We want to plant an operative in their camp. Make some identifications. Get some surveillance going.’

Nod.

Stare down at the six by tens.

Brattenbury has, I’m sure, noticed the direction of my gaze before now, but this is the first time he responds directly. He flips the photos over one by one, leaving just a singleton still face down on the table.

The photos are of people. Mugshots and full length profiles. One of them is of me. I’m wearing something from Next. Pale blue blouse, cardigan, grey skirt, dark court shoes. Bland, safe, officey.

There are four other photos, all of men. Men in their thirties or younger forties. Short hair. Muscular, or at least tough-looking. Narrow eyes, strong jaws. The men are all wearing jeans. Dark shirts or T-shirts. Casual jackets, one leather, one denim, the two others not far removed from the same denim-leather school of couture. Four men with a whiff of the macho.

I recognize three of the men: my colleagues. One I don’t, but I assume he’s a copper too, just one I haven’t met. The three men I recognize have all worked undercover.

I know where this is going.

‘I understand you’ve just completed your undercover course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did very well. An unusually strong performance, I’m told.’

I shrug. ‘It was a training thing, not a real thing.’ That’s not wonderful English, but at least my voice seems to be working again.

‘That’s perfectly true. There’s a huge difference and yet the training is designed for real life. By people who have lived that life.’

Nod.

‘Fiona, we need a payroll clerk. Someone who
looks
like a payroll clerk. Someone who could do the job of a payroll clerk. We need an outstanding investigator and someone with nerve. Preferably also someone local. We could bring in someone from Birmingham, say, but then they look like someone being brought in for a reason. They’ll be the first person our targets will suspect.’

Nod.

There’s a glance between Jackson and Brattenbury. Jackson reaches out and flips the last photo. It’s of Kureishi. His corpse. Not a shot I’ve seen before. This one is full frontal. It takes a moment to notice that he has stumps in place of hands. There’s blood all over his legs. From this angle, the look on his face isn’t one of astonishment, but of anguish. Either that, or I’m just viewing it differently.

‘Fiona.’ This is Jackson talking. ‘I want you to know that you do not have to accept this assignment. I want you to know that we regard it as exceptionally dangerous. If you are exposed, the likelihood is that you end up like this.’ He taps the photo of Kureishi. ‘If you say no, that will not be held against you in any way at all. Not when it comes to promotion. Not when it comes to allocating work. Not in any way at all. Do you understand?’

Nod.

‘I need you to say yes or no.’

‘Yes. I understand.’