22.

A long working day.

From five to eight thirty, office cleaning. Acres of open cubicles under fluorescent tube lighting. A million yards of nylon carpet. A thousand dustbins. A hundred bathrooms, ceramics gleaming, floor tiles astonishing in their whiteness.

I do my stuff. Don’t get praised or rebuked. My main cleaning partner is a woman, Lowri, who seems sour. She does all the hoovering. I do the bins and most of the dusting. She wipes her nose and tells me about her allergies.

At half-eight, I use the Ladies to change into something a bit more formal for the office: skirt and jacket in place of trousers and a fleece. Get peppermint tea and a pastry from a coffee shop. Am at my desk in Western Vale by just before nine.

Do my payroll work, which I go on finding hard to love. It’s as though we live in some bureaucrats’ heaven, where people, names, dates of birth flow over our desk and through our hands in a stream that has no start and no end. HMRC floats over our every transaction like the remote but threatening God of some failing Amazonian tribe.

We pay homage and buy hot drinks from a vending machine at 20p a cup.

Yesterday, I did the thing that Henderson paid me a grand to do. Nothing illegal. Not at this stage. He simply wanted me to change the assignment list that our department head, Krissy Philips, keeps on a spreadsheet in her office. There’s no particular magic about that list. Mostly it’s just a way of making sure that work is divided evenly between Philips’s worker bees. When everyone else went to lunch, I just waited around, pretending I had a personal call to make. Then just walked into Philips’s office, pulled up the spreadsheet, and switched forty-eight names from other people to me. Switched the same number of my names back to them, so no one’s total workload was either greater or less. The whole thing took seven minutes. One person, not from our department, entered while I was working, then went away again when he saw the place empty.

The switch of names means that the twenty-nine false payroll accounts now come under my jurisdiction. I haven’t yet falsified anything. All I’ve done so far is ensure that no one else in the department will locate the fraud and expose it.

When I’d done what Henderson asked, I called him on his mobile and told him. He told me to meet him that evening at The Grape and The Grain, gave me a thousand pounds in cash, told me I’d done well. Said there might be more jobs down the road.

He offered me a drink. I said no and he didn’t press. He didn’t say anything more about the immigration lawyer and I didn’t ask. Just walked out into the night, holding my bag tight against my side.

The next morning, I paid the money into my Post Office savings account. Any spare money I have left over at the end of the week goes in the same place. When I take my laptop to the library in the evenings, I check out immigration lawyers. And it’s true: immigration law is basically a matter of cash. Pay the right guy enough and he’ll find a way to sneak you through the system. It’s good to know. I start making lists.

One puzzle: Henderson asked me to switch forty-eight names, but Brattenbury is only aware of a fraud affecting twenty-nine. When we met on Saturday, Brattenbury promised to check his figures but neither he nor I have an easy explanation of the discrepancy.

At eleven this morning, the internal mail comes round. There’s an envelope for me – from Brattenbury, though nothing says so. Inside, a single sheet. A map of my studio apartment. Dotted lines mark out the expected field of vision of Henderson’s surveillance. It’s good news, on the whole. He can see the entire living area of the apartment, but not much of the bed and the area where I usually get changed is also out of sight. I realize that if I move the wardrobe by just a few inches, I’ll shield the bed completely.

I put the sheet aside with some other documents. Forty minutes later, take the whole stack to the shredder and destroy the lot.

At lunchtime, I ‘forget’ my mobile and use a colleague’s phone to text Buzz. OK TO DELIVER GOODS. FXXX. Delete the text from the Sent folder. Return the phone.

Work hard. But by four o’clock, I’m yawning. I’ve been up for twelve hours and working for nearly eleven. I drink peppermint tea and look at spreadsheets.

Leave at five. Buy some groceries and a sandwich. Buy a coat hook for the back of the door.

Walk home through Bute Park. Walk aimlessly. Watch the river from the bridge. Move between the formal beds and the long wooded walks. I can’t see anyone following me, and I come into Bute Park often enough that my movements won’t look suspicious.

I eat my sandwich next to some bushes by the river. Throw bits of bread to some waterbirds – two coots and some sort of wagtail – but they treat my offerings with contempt. Next to me, in the dark of the bushes, an envelope gleams white. I reach for it and put it in my bag. Throw the rest of my sandwich away and the wagtail, alarmed, flies off downriver.

That evening, I go to Jason’s flat and offer to make supper for us. He says, OK and do we need anything? I say no, but show him the coat hook and where I want it.

As he starts to wrestle with my bradawl, I start to cook.

Start to cook, but also float over to his computer, which is switched on. Open up his web browser. Click Options on the browser menu, then select Security. The Security tab should really be called an Insecurity tab because, among other flim-flam, it asks if I want to see Saved Passwords. I do. Get a list of sites – only about quarter of them porno – with stored usernames. I click the button that offers to Show Passwords. It says, ‘Are you sure?’ which doesn’t strike me as the world’s most testing security interrogation. I select ‘Yes’ and a complete list appears on screen.

OLIVIA06.

The name of his daughter and the year of her birth. A single password controlling a million different accounts. Thank you, Olivia. Thank you, Jason. The simple perils of fatherly love.

I close everything and go back to the stove.

That night before I go to bed, I throw open my window and make myself a joint, a big one, fat with hash.

Smoke it, slowly, with a cup of peppermint tea and a box of chocolates – a little extra gift from Buzz – on the arm of the chair.

Normally at this stage in a murder investigation, I’m very well acquainted with the victims. Have their faces pinned up by my desk. At home, even. The faces of the dead, photographed at the scene of their death. Postcards sent from their world to ours.

I find it strange, disorienting, not having those images available to me. It seems almost irreverent to go chasing off after murderers without the victims at the cold dead center of the chase. A wedding without a bride. A feast without wine.

I’ve also felt uncomfortable being so far removed from Brattenbury’s inquiry. From one perspective, of course, I’m the steel point on the tip of SOCA’s javelin. The thing that forces entry, opens the flesh, does the damage. But I’m also a copper and a Cambridge graduate. The policewoman in me wants to see the inquiry’s records. To see the data remorselessly collecting. Lists of names, dates, phone calls, bank transfers. Witness statements and officers’ reports. The Cambridge graduate in me likes the same thing. Puts her trust in paperwork, the primary sources for any inquiry.

It’s not even that Brattenbury can’t keep me abreast of these things in the limited time we have available, it’s that he doesn’t want to. The undercover operating manual says that the more fully I live in role, the less likely I am to commit an error. So Brattenbury tells me the minimum, tries to restrict every investigative impulse I have.

He’s a good investigator, but careful. And I don’t do well with careful.

I eat a chocolate, finish my joint, finish my tea, get ready for bed.

I’m conscious of Henderson’s camera now, but not paranoid. If I pass it in my underwear, I don’t care too much. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve got weapons of my own.

When Jason fixed the coat hook on my door, the extra protrusion meant it kept banging up against the wardrobe. So we shifted the wardrobe sideways. Only a few inches, but enough.

In the envelope Buzz left for me was the iPad my dad gave me for Christmas, also the cash, and also the name of a street in Llandaff, just across the river from here.

In bed, under the duvet, hidden from Henderson’s gaze, I turn the iPad on, wait for it to scout out the local wireless networks. It finds a few – it would do in here – and I poke around until I find Jason’s. The system asks me for a password and I offer it Jason’s tender homage to his daughter. OLIVIA06.

The tablet thinks about that, then admits me, unaccusingly, to the world of the digital. Working under the duvet, I start to explore the world I’ve been missing.

A world of investigation and the faces of the dead.