6.

It’s three weeks later, but feels more. I’m in a shit flat close to where the M1 disgorges into London, a long stone’s throw from Brent Cross. I’m on the eighth floor of an eleven-story building. One of the lifts is out of order and the curtains on my windows are made of unlined orange cotton. My kitchen contains a packet of sliced bread, some margarine, some peppermint tea bags and a tin of beans. I don’t have a can opener.

It is midnight, and I have to be at work in Wembley by four. I’m not allowed my car here, and the journey time by public transport is an hour.

So far this week, I have averaged less than four hours sleep a night.

I put some margarine on a slice of bread and eat it, standing up, looking out of the window. There’s music coming from the flat above me. Music and an argument.

I’d like to call Buzz. Not about anything, just to chat. Hear his voice, learn what’s been going on at the office. Laugh a bit too much at one of his jokes, just for the pleasure of feeling his pleasure at my appreciation.

We’ve been going out for slightly more than a year. I would say it’s been my longest ever relationship but in truth it’s been my first ever relationship. First proper one. I remember when we first started dating I thought, I realize I would like to be Dave Brydon’s girlfriend. The sort who would remember his birthday, act appropriately in front of his parents and think to wear their most expensive knickers on St Valentine’s Day. And I’ve ticked those boxes, all of them. I haven’t just remembered his birthday, but I got everything right at Christmas and have, mostly, remembered our important anniversaries. I don’t get waves of love from his parents – him a manager at a national building products company, her the deputy head of a village school in the Forest of Dean – but my mishaps and misdemeanors have all been fairly minor, all explainable as That’s just Fi for you, I’m afraid. I even got Valentine’s Day right too. I couldn’t quite believe that fully grown adults took all that commercial red-heart pap seriously, but I checked with my sister beforehand who told me yes, they really did. So I did it. Played the part. Wore a nice black dress with expensive undies, red and slutty, underneath. Let Buzz take me to dinner. Expressed surprise and delight when, inevitably, a dozen red roses were produced. Let myself be coaxed into drinking a whole glass and a half of champagne – a lot for me – and happily shared a chocolate pudding glazed with raspberry coulis in the shape of a heart. Then we went back to Buzz’s place where we made red and slutty love, saying that we loved each other and meaning it.

I look at my phone. It’s mine, not something issued by the training course. All my numbers pre-programmed. A couple of taps and I’m talking to a yawning Buzzman.

But I’m not allowed to phone him. Not him, not Mam or Dad, not Ant or Kay. No one at work. No one.

So I don’t.

Just stand at the window, eat bread and margarine, listen to the argument above me. Traffic curls down the A406. I can’t see the mouth of the M1, but somehow you feel its presence. Exhaust-fumed, grimy and congested. An ill-tempered beast, belching lorries. My hair feels greasy but I don’t have a hairdryer here and I don’t want to go to bed with wet hair.

I’m out of clean underwear, so I wash three pairs of knickers in the bathroom sink and hang them out on a radiator. They won’t be dry in the morning.

I do my teeth, but without fervor. Look at my hair, which is greasy. Still don’t wash it.

Bed.

My bed is made up of a second-hand mattress lying directly on the floor. Sheets clean enough and the duvet warm. I think if my eyes were like other people’s, they’d be aching to close. I’d be half asleep already. But it doesn’t work like that for me. I am tired, but that doesn’t always mean I find it easy to sleep. So I just lie down and look at the light on the ceiling until sleep overtakes me. When it does, it’s dreamless and dark.

The alarm clock rings at two forty. It’s dark outside and the flat is cold.

Still wrapped in my duvet, I walk to the shower, get it hot, then step into it. Wash my hair. Wash everything else. Do you have to brush your teeth if you last brushed them less than three hours ago? Don’t know, but I do anyway.

My knickers are still roughly as damp as they were when I hung them out last night. I choose the least wet.

Get dressed. My uniform consists of a pale grey polo shirt, a pale grey fleece top, black trousers, which I had to supply myself, and a mid-blue tabard which is in a unisex style and fit and consequently too big for me. I put it all on. The shirt, fleece and tabard all have the same corporate logo: YCS Cleaning and a meaningless geometrical logo in orange and blue.

Into the kitchen. Ponder the breakfast menu briefly. Opt for bread and margarine, but don’t manage to eat much.

Then off to work. There’s a direct bus which is theoretically faster, but it’s unreliable and I’ve already had a warning for being late. So I walk to Cricklewood station, take a night bus in to Baker Street, take a second bus out to the Harrow Road and walk from there. It’s a ridiculous way to make the journey – an hour to travel about five miles – but it gets me there on time.

We gather in the dark, my colleagues and I. Six of us. Me, Amina, Ruqia, Diwata, Maria and someone whose name I’m not quite sure of. I think Milenka. Amina’s huge smile cleaves the darkness. I smile back, though I doubt if my version cleaves quite the same.

Maria has cigarettes. I want one badly but I bummed a cigarette off her yesterday and in this world you need to give back. It’s cold out and though I’m wrapped up, I still feel it.

At five to four, a black Honda Accord pulls up. Marcus Conway, our boss. He greets us, ticks our names off his list, then unlocks the main office door and leads us down to the service basement where the cleaning stuff is kept. A trolley each. Cleaning stuff. Large transparent waste sack. Spare liners for the office bins.

We’re each allocated a different floor, because they don’t like us talking to each other when we’re working. When Conway gives us an instruction, we’ve been trained to answer, ‘Yes, Mr. Conway.’ To start with, that all felt a little Victorian-mill-owner to me and I’ve never been the best little Victorian factory girl. But if it’s good enough for Amina, it’s good enough for me and when Conway tells me, ‘Fiona, you’ll take the fourth floor. All the computers need cleaning and the internal office windows. Have you got that?’, I just mutter, ‘Yes, Mr. Conway.’ And when he asks me to check I have the right cleaning kit for the screens and keyboards, I do check, just as he asks, then say it again.

And off I go, with my yellow trolley and a polyester tabard that reaches to my knees.

Oddly, it’s the cleaning I find hardest about all this. Not that I have to work hard, I’m OK with that. But the actual process of cleaning itself. Wipe, dust, empty. Wipe, dust, empty. My brain can’t stick with the routine. It keeps firing off elsewhere. I honestly try my hardest, but my hardest is a bit ramshackle. Sometimes I do everything I’m meant to do. Other times, I realize I forgot to empty half the bins, or have left a waste bag in the middle of a corridor, or haven’t cleaned the toilets. But I do my best.

We work at this office from four till just before six, then at another, larger, office from six to almost nine. In the City, I’ve heard that you can get as much as £7.20 per hour. Out here, though, we’re strictly minimum wage, no sick pay, no long-term contracts, no holiday pay, no nothing.

At nine, we have to remove our tabards and empty out our pockets. That’s Conway’s way to show us that he’s alive to the risk of us stealing. But he knows and we know that if we nicked anything, it would be cash and we would hide it in our underwear, so all the pocket-emptying is really no more than panto.

Today, unusually, I have free time between nine and five. Normally we have to meet for coursework. Lessons on surveillance methods. Case studies. Lots of legal stuff. We have to know the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act pretty much backwards, but there’s a lot of other law too. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act, of course. The Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act. European law and court rulings.

This is the National Undercover Training and Assessment course and it’s the toughest course offered by the police service. Most people who apply are rejected. Even when you’re accepted onto the course, 85 per cent of students fail.

I’m not even sure why I applied. A memo came round last year asking if anyone was interested and I said yes. No real reason. Curiosity, I suppose.

Buzz hates the idea of me working undercover. He doesn’t like the danger. He doesn’t like the loss of contact. It took me time to realize it, but he’s hurt that I even applied for the course. As though it was some kind of snub to him.

I’ve mended things since then, I think. Told him that I have no intention of doing one of those marathon infiltrations. The things that last years and mess with your brain. I told him what might even be the truth: that I hate being told I can’t do something, so I want to make sure that I’ve got the ability to do it if I want to. Which I won’t.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s logical. As far as Buzz goes – well, I don’t know, but it’ll be better once the course is over.

The course isn’t mostly about law. We learn about managing a second identity, or ‘legend’ as it’s called by the undercover specialists who teach us. I’m Fiona Grey now. Fiona isn’t pretending to be a cleaner, she is a cleaner. We learn how to construct our pasts. Invent them. Get paperwork in the new names, get a history. Learn that history so it starts to become ours.

And we learn about danger. Infiltration is a tactic we only ever use against organized crime, or groups thought to be planning acts of violence or terror. Make a mistake on an infiltration and it’s not going to be a ‘Whoops, sorry, Sarge’ moment. It’s going to be a shot to the back of the head, bag in the river type moment.

We hear stories of undercover officers who have simply disappeared. Missing, presumed dead. Hear what happens when things go wrong.

The best sessions are briefings given by actual practitioners. Accounts of what it’s actually like. The dangers, the situations you get into. When we started, most of the questions had to do with the drama of the chase. Making contact with the bad guys. Gaining their trust. Executing the bust. The armed raids and the car chases. By now, though, our interest has shifted. My fellow students ask about what it’s like to be cut off from family. How you get through Christmas. What it’s like to live in fear.

The answers get more truthful too. One guy – Steve, a London Detective Sergeant – said he was on a job that lasted twenty-two months. Unfortunately his marriage only lasted eighteen of them. One of my fellow students asked him whether he regretted his decision to take the assignment. He said, ‘Every day, mate. Literally every day.’

Today, though, we have a break, our first on the course. My cleaning money has been very late in coming through to my bank account – my Fiona Grey account, that is – hence my rather basic eating and hygiene arrangements. I assume the money was held up by the course authorities. They can’t replicate the fear of a real infiltration, but they can reproduce some of the stresses. Hence the isolation, the long hours, the lack of sleep, the constant little indignities.

They have all of us on two jobs, antisocial hours. I clean in the morning, waitress in the evening. The waitressing runs from six to eleven, or more like midnight on busy nights. It’s not every night of the week, because our training often runs into the evenings, but it mops up what little free time I might have.

I sleep in between the waitressing and the cleaning. Make use of any spare half hours that come my way. Doze on trains.

When I try the bank again today, my money has come through and I withdraw fifty pounds. Spend most of it on a cheap hairdryer, a can opener and some ready-meals. Sit in a café and do my law revision.

It feels like luxury this: to have time and money. Those things and clean hair.

I take my time.

When I’m done, I go back to the flat. Collect dirty clothes to take to the launderette. I should take one of my law books, but I don’t.

When I’m sitting, snoozing, waiting for the spin cycle to end, a guy parks himself next to me on the slatted wooden bench. I wake up, shift away. The guy is middle-aged, heavy, close-cropped hair. A Londoner.

‘What’s your name, love?’

‘Fiona.’

He thumps his chest and says, ‘Dez.’

I shrug.

‘You’re with YCS, right?’

I shrug again. I’m still wearing their damn fleece.

‘Listen, sweetheart, I’ve got a little job that needs doing, all right? Won’t get you into any trouble and it’s worth a hundred quid, cash.’

The machine next to me stops spinning. I try the handle, but it’s got one of those stupid safety releases which make you wait a minute before anything happens.

It’s hard not to smile.

This course isn’t mostly theoretical. It’s not mostly about learning the law. Really, they shove you into a situation, deprive you of sleep, and see if you can cope. This man, ‘Dez’, is the next step. He’ll ask me to do something illegal – steal something, plant something, I don’t know what. I’ll demur the right length of time, then say yes. The pressure will ratchet up. Less sleep, more phony danger.

And they’ll try to fool me. A police officer will ‘recognize’ me as a buddy of his from Hendon. Or someone will call me Griffiths, not Grey, my new name, and see how I respond.

I’ll do just fine, I already know it. If I’d filled in my personality questionnaires honestly, they’d never have selected me for the course. Too vulnerable. History of mental disorder. Blah, blah.

Truth is, though, I’m pretty much ideal for this kind of work. The hardest thing about going undercover is the stress. The isolation, the fear, the risk of discovery. But my world is mostly like that anyway. I have problems with sleep. I’m used to isolation. It’s my default state and I have to work hard to avoid it. As for the stuff that happens to people when they’re alone and under stress –dissociation, loss of normal feelings – well, I’ve already won the gold ticket in that particular lottery. A little menial work in north-west London hardly registers.

When the safety thing clicks on the washing machine. I transfer my stuff into the dryer. Put in two quid. Set it going.

Dez tries again. A hundred quid to take a black notebook from a locked drawer in the Wembley office.

I say, ‘I’ll lose my job.’

When he tries again, I pull my stuff, still wet, from the dryer and walk out of the launderette.