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.’

‘You’re going to call my attention to the fact that a crucial letter was forged and that the forgery contributed to Morgan’s death.’

‘I am.’

‘You’re going to add that the financial transactions we’ve been able to trace so far don’t look like routine payroll fraud.’

‘No, they don’t.’

‘And you’ll use those things to talk up a case of constructive manslaughter.’

‘It is manslaughter. An unlawful act leading to unintended death. That’s manslaughter.’

‘OK, then I’ll look down at my list of current tasks and assignments and I’ll find myself agreeing with DI Dunwoody’s assessment that our limited resources could be better deployed elsewhere, particularly as our friends and colleagues in Fraud now have the manpower to take this on. If a manslaughter charge arises from their investigation, we’ll do what’s necessary to assist any prosecution.’

‘Except that, as you keep telling me, I’m a cheap resource of doubtful reliability. If I spent more time on the Morgan case, I probably wouldn’t even be missed.’

Cheap resource: the last time I had a proper telling-off from Jackson was when he discovered that I hadn’t filled out any overtime sheets for five months. These things matter, apparently.

‘Very doubtful,’ mutters Jackson, his attention on his computer. He flicks through what’s been done so far.

When you get to Jackson’s level of seniority, you’re not a field officer any more. You seldom get to visit crime scenes, interview suspects, force entry. The stink of these things reaches you only at second-hand, from the officers who were there and the reports they compile. But every senior copper was once a plod. They don’t lose their sense of smell, they just get the scent from different sources.

Jackson reviews the case notes with swift precision. His fingers are heavy on the computer, but also rapid. Deft.

He lifts his eyes to me again. Dark eyes, shaggily browed.

‘Look, you lot have covered most of the basics already. And for all we know there’s a guy called T.M. Baron living on the Costa del Crime, in which case the Fraud boys will just get an EAW and have him picked up.’

EAW: a European Arrest Warrant. A delightfully simple procedure.

‘The money won’t stop in Spain and our perpetrator isn’t called T.M. Baron.’

I can’t prove that, of course, but most payroll fraud is visibly stupid. Inflated salaries, implausible bonuses, zero deductions, addresses and bank details that track straight through to someone with access to the corporate payroll system. This fraud was clean enough that, for sixteen months, it went untraced. Anyone with the sophistication and patience to set it up wouldn’t be stupid enough to sit in a villa near Torremolinos, waiting to be arrested.

‘Probably not.’

‘And remember, we don’t know how large this fraud really is.’

Jackson works his eyebrows at me, so I add, ‘It was a very clean fraud, which implies some professionalism and organization. But organized crime isn’t interested in a couple of thousand pounds a month. They’d need far more than that to make it worth their while. My guess: if we really take a look at this, we’ll find numerous other small frauds built on the same basic model and tracing through to the same ultimate destination.’

I don’t say, because Jackson is smart enough to see it for himself, that the Morgan–Gibson fraud almost certainly involved a minimum of two people. There’s the T.M. Baron character: whoever it was that collected the first sixteen months’ worth of payments. Then there’s the lower-level idiot who started emptying the Morgan–Gibson accounts. Who blew the whole racket up for a gain of just £5,600.

An end of summer wasp crawls against Jackson’s office window, butting its head against an obstacle it doesn’t understand and can’t overcome. Jackson stares at the wasp with a face that has the emptiness of sculpture.

He looks back at his computer, hits some buttons.

‘Your course starts soon, doesn’t it?’

‘Next week.’

Jackson ponders a little further. His version of pondering involves hitting the flat of his hand softly against the top of his desk and staring into the middle distance.

‘Look, I take your point, but I think we need to leave this with Fraud for now. I’ll talk to – who’s that new guy over from Swansea?’

‘Rhodri Stephens.’

‘I’ll talk to him. Tell him we take this seriously, that we think there’s a manslaughter prosecution floating around here. We’ll give them time to make a case of it, see where they get to.’

Because my face doesn’t instantly assume the ‘yes, O Mighty One’ reverence that all senior officers think is their due, Jackson adds, ‘Fiona, fraud is a job for the Fraud Squad. It is not a job for Major Crime and it is not your job to tell me mine.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I think that’s our five minutes. Thank you for the coffee.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Good luck with the course.’

I nod and leave the room.