16.

I get a job. Cleaning again. Minimum wage. Start at five, work through to two o’clock. Offices and other commercial property.

I like it, like everything about it. I like the early starts. I like the routine and the pressure. I become quite good at it, definitely one of the better cleaners. I’m still a bit forgetful, especially in the big open plan offices, but I enjoy doing the floors and I’m ace on bathrooms and toilets. I like the sparkle from a properly cleaned mirror and the gleam from a row of clean white ceramic loos. I also like the invisibility. The way no one notices you when you clean around them. People might slightly lower their voices when they speak to each other in my presence, but not much. I’ve become like one of those minor modern inconveniences: a swipe-card entry system or a telephone menu. Something that irritates briefly and is then ignored. My best friend is a Filipina, Juvy Barretto. She has six teeth and bad English, but we smile a lot. She helps me with the big offices, telling me what to do when I get confused. I help her with the bathrooms, where she doesn’t move as fast as I do.

So I mop, I clean, I dust, I hoover. I’m seldom late. I never complain. I don’t pick stupid fights with anyone. I’m issued with a new tabard – smart, polyester, navy blue – and I take good care of it. Wash it. Iron it. Keep it nice.

I make sandwiches at the hostel and eat them for lunch. Abs has got me a single room to myself – tiny, but I don’t mind that.

And she’s got big plans for me, Abs has. She wants me to get my own place. I’m not on any kind of priority housing list because I’m single, no kids, no health issues and no recent connection with the area. On the other hand, I’m earning good money now. After deductions, I’m making £189 a week. I have to pay £28 to the hostel – quite a lot, but I’m in work – and then meals and transport costs another £55. I try to avoid expensive stuff, meat especially, and walk as much as I can, but there are limits.

In any case, I’m making money and I start looking for properties to rent. Find a place on the A470 North Road, just by the intersection with Western Avenue. It’s a studio flat. All-in-one bedroom, living room, kitchenette. Shared bathroom down the hall. The bed is a single with a lumpy mattress. The living room part of the set-up consists of a giant brown velour armchair, a Formica table and two folding metal chairs. The kitchenette comprises a tiny sink, a two-ring hob and a microwave. There’s a big brown wardrobe of the sort that grandmothers used to keep in order to give small children nightmares. It smells of mothballs and something else, I’m not sure what. I’m on the second floor and my window looks out onto no fewer than nine lanes of traffic. The A470 itself, plus slip roads leading on and off the main ramp. There are always lights, always noise, always traffic.

I like almost everything about it. I like the roads outside, their neon brightness. I like the way there isn’t too much of anything: one room, one bed, one armchair, one table, one sink. I like the smallness, especially. If I sit in my giant velour armchair, I can touch the bed with my right arm and, almost, the little kitchen range with my left. It’s harder for me to get lost, physically or metaphorically.

Because the only address I can give is a homeless shelter, my potential landlord wants two and a half months’ deposit from me upfront. That’s a lot more than I can afford, but Abs helps me take out a loan from a social housing fund. The loan doesn’t just cover the deposit, but also things like bedding. When I get the money and sign my rental agreement, she’s genuinely thrilled for me. I’m thrilled for myself, actually. Proud. She tells me about a Freecycle place which helps people starting out or, like me, restarting. I get as much as I can for free. A nice man drives the stuff over to my place in his lunch break. I try to give him two pounds, but he tells me not to worry. He calls me ‘love’.

Abs makes me promise to come in for weekly counselling and ‘life planning sessions’. She wants to get me out of the minimum wage cleaning racket and into the sunny uplands of payroll clerking. She’s checked with the Institute of Payroll Professionals and found that they have a log of my payroll certificates: a log which shows the extent of SOCA’s always confident reach. Abs gives me reprints of my past glories.

‘We run a mentoring service as part of our reintegration work,’ she says. ‘We’ve got a mentor who’s heard about your case and who’s really keen to work with you, Adrian Boothby.’

Boothby: what Adrian Brattenbury has chosen to call himself for these purposes.

I promise to come in for mentoring. Say I’m keen to get back into payroll.

When I meet Brattenbury for the first time since before Florida, it’s the end of January and a grey rain beats against the window of the little room that the hostel sets aside for these things.

Brattenbury is tanned and fit-looking. Skiing, at a guess. He’s wearing a dark blue shirt, open-necked. By police standards, Adrian Brattenbury is a very dapper chap.

He says, ‘How was your Christmas?’

‘Good actually. I’ve been enjoying myself.’

He assumes I’m being ironic and makes the necessary ironic smile in return, but I’m being sincere.

‘Time to get you in play,’ he says. He outlines his plans. I’m happy with his suggestions. He seems both intelligent and trustworthy, and he’ll need to be both. He doesn’t give me much detail on the workplace I’m going to. ‘Fiona Grey wouldn’t have any background, so you shouldn’t either.’ Logic I agree with.

On Tinker, he tells me what they have: not much. ‘We haven’t been able to track the money. All those Panama foundations and BVI shell companies – they’re totally opaque. As far as the individual frauds are concerned, we know the local moles. We think we’ve identified their handler.’ He flips a photo at me. A thirty-something man. Short dark hair, starting to thin. The photo was taken on a street somewhere and shows him in a grey wool coat and navy scarf. The photo tells me nothing. The man could be an accountant or a murderer. Or both. ‘We think this is the guy, but until we get up close and personal, we won’t know.’

I look at the photo. If I’m the tethered goat, is this to be my lion?

Brattenbury wants the keys to my room. I’ve only got one set, but I give them to him. He says he’ll leave them back here at the hostel later.

‘We’ll wire up your room. Audio and video. You won’t find anything even if you search for it. We’ll do the same for your workplace when we get you in there. We’re also going to embed devices in your personal items. Bag, coats, buttons, that sort of thing. The devices themselves are tiny, it’s battery power that limits us, so please choose chunky over sleek. These things will be found if searched for by an expert, but they’ll elude any ordinary search. We get our kit from the same outfit that handles the intelligence services, so it’s as good as it gets.’

He slides a phone over to me. Cheap, non-contract. With receipt showing a cash payment. ‘Phone. They would need an electronics lab to detect the alterations we’ve made to this. Keep it with you whenever you can, so we can track your physical presence at all times. And keep it charged. The phone will pull down more battery power than you might expect.’

He gives me data too. Code words for use in emergency. Words that will get an armed response unit to me as fast as possible. But we both know that I may or may not be able to deploy those words. If my phone has been removed, and if I’m not at home or at work, I’ll be out of contact. I doubt if Saj Kureishi had code words or an armed response team at his disposal, but if he did, they wouldn’t have been of much use to him, strapped to a chair in an empty house in the empty country just south of Barnstaple.

I think of Kureishi’s face. The expression that looks astonished from one point of view, anguished from another. Wonder if these things ever mean anything.

‘You OK?’ says Brattenbury, winding up.

‘Yes, sir.’

A smile twitches at his mouth. ‘You don’t really need to “sir” me, not here.’

‘No.’ I’m not exactly known as a maximum deference type, so I’m not sure why I’ve started sirring now. ‘I think it’s Fiona Grey. I think she says “sir”.’

Brattenbury looks quizzically amused. ‘Well, whatever you want.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

And I sit there noticing dust marks while Brattenbury talks at me and a grey rain washes the window outside.