26.

Early June.

Summer in the city, except that the city seems trapped in a gloomy cycle of brisk winds and scudding, intermittent rain. At the weekend, the Queen celebrated her Jubilee with a small armada of boats crowding the Thames. But the river was grey and furious, the wind unceasing, the rain constant. I didn’t watch most of the coverage – I was down at the hostel, engaged in laundry chores and table football – but found something impressive about the sheer wetness of the whole episode. That people endured it. That they chose to.

And through all of this my life continues to progress. In the early mornings, I clean. During the day, I do my payroll clerking and manage Henderson’s fraud. See either Quintrell or Henderson at least once a week. Sometimes more.

When Henderson’s on duty, he comes to my flat. The last couple of times, he’s been businesslike and brisk, but he seems different this time. More open. More widely curious.

As I get on my eccentrically bottomed saucepan on to heat water for tea, he inspects my studio in detail. The yellow sheet on the fridge. My meagre kitchen utensils. The interior of my wardrobe: its few clothes and not-very-healthy cannabis plants.

He says, ‘You could get somewhere better now, couldn’t you? You’ve got two jobs, plus what we pay you.’

‘I’m saving up.’

‘For emigration?’

I nod.

‘You hate it here that much?’

I glance out of the window. At the nine-lane road. The rain. Spray-paint graffiti on a garden wall. At the metallic insects and their unreachable heaven.

He laughs and says, ‘You’re probably right. You’re probably right.’

His curiosity also extends to my laptop.

‘You don’t get internet in here? You don’t want it?’

I shrug and look fiercely down.

I don’t know if Henderson ever had a police training, or similar, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Most interrogators rush things. Fill the silence. Henderson is happy to scrutinize. To let these little micro-expressions talk to him.

He studies me a while, then pushes again. ‘You can get deals for nothing these days. Fifteen quid a month, something like that.’

I start speaking, choke a bit, clear my throat and try a second time. ‘It’s on contract.’

‘On contract?’ Henderson is puzzled for a moment, then figures it out. ‘It’s your credit rating, is it?’

‘They want past addresses. I haven’t always had all this.’ I wave a hand at my newly come by opulence. The Sun King showing off a newly landscaped deer park.

‘Look, if you want—’

I shake my head. ‘I go to the library. It’s fine.’

Again, Henderson inspects me. I don’t meet his eye. I seldom do. Just let him hold me under his gaze until he’s done.

It’s a curious feeling to be appraised like this. If I had to bet, I’d say that Henderson was in the room when Kureishi was killed and, quite likely, the one swinging the chopper. That edge of brutality never feels far distant. Like rocks lying underwater with nothing showing but a curl of white foam and too much seething silence. Yet I don’t dislike spending time with him. He’s kinder to me than Quintrell is. Something more human, even in his cruelty.

As if reading my thoughts, he produces a small gift from his bag. ‘Here. For you.’

A small chocolate cake in a box, tied with a pink ribbon.

I realize the cake comes from one of the posh patisseries whose windows so attracted Fiona Grey on one of her Sunday wanderings. Henderson is creepy enough to follow her, nice enough to buy her cake.

I can’t do the math on that, but say thank you anyway.

‘OK, shall we take a look at what you’ve been up to?’

I get out my papers. Forms, photocopies, lists. Place them in front of him on the little Formica table. Say, ‘Do you want tea?’

Henderson looks uncertain. A man trying to work out whether it would be more polite to say yes or no. He chooses yes.

The water in my funny saucepan is boiling now, so I get out my only mug and a bowl. Make peppermint tea in the bowl for me, tea in the mug for him. Cut two slices of cake and put them on a plate.

‘I don’t have milk, sorry, but if you want, I can …’

‘No, that’s fine. As long as it’s hot and wet, eh?’

He sits at the Formica table and pores over my documents.

I sit on the arm of my armchair and watch the rain, the cars, the first glow from sodium street lights. Nibble cake.

Henderson isn’t picky the way Quintrell is. I don’t know what he checks, to be honest. I don’t think he has the accountancy skills to know what’s right and what isn’t. The few times he’s tried to question things in my work, he’s revealed a pretty slim understanding of the underlying mechanics.

But it’s nice, these sessions. For the first time, I feel properly attuned to the corpses that brought me here. Hayley Morgan: a troubled woman, who ate rat poison and plaster sooner than walk down the hill to ask for help. Saj Kureishi: a thief who fell out with his bosses and sold his life for £5,600. Their presences are with me now.

And my iPad has made me feel less isolated. Brattenbury’s boys have built a very secure nest for the machine, in the bathroom box work. When I’m not using my internet connection to research my father and Gareth Glyn, I spend my time trawling the Tinker data too.

It’s impressive. Brattenbury has, I’d estimate, a team equivalent to about thirty full-time officers. Some of those are borrowed from my own department at Cathays. Others are head-office analysts. Computer technicians in south London. Communications experts in Cheltenham. SOCA’s own surveillance specialists.

Armed officers too. Until I saw the case files properly, I hadn’t realized the effort that goes into protecting me. Every time I’ve met Henderson or Quintrell, Brattenbury has had a minimum of two armed officers within sixty seconds of me. There are, right now, two armed officers in a van waiting on Laytonia Road. Three further uniformed officers, two of them armed, in a patrol car no more than half a mile distant.

And yet – what have we accomplished? Almost nothing. We have nothing to justify a murder charge. We could certainly nail both Henderson and Quintrell for fraud, but this case demands charges far bigger than merely that. The Astra-man, Allan Wiley, we can’t attach to any crime, though we’re certain he’s part of the group. Indeed, Henderson talks a lot about ‘his colleagues’ and implies the existence of a substantial organization behind him, yet we can’t even glimpse it, let alone destroy it.

Brattenbury did follow up on my suggestion about trying to track a Kureishi replacement. They looked for times and dates when Henderson and Quintrell seemed to be in the same place. There were numerous matches in Cardiff – just what you’d expect from two mobile people living together in the same, mid-sized city – but almost none elsewhere. There was a time they were both in Central London – CCTV shows their cars making use of the same car park – but it proved impossible to link that visit to any dodgy IT consultant living locally. On another occasion, they both made use of the same hotel just outside Heathrow airport. They were day visitors only, neither of them spending a night there, but both made use of the car park for a full eight hours.

Aside from those frustratingly suggestive encounters, there was a possible rendezvous in Swansea, but the overlap time might have been no more than twenty or thirty minutes, suggesting that the ‘meeting’ was no more than coincidence. Another possible rendezvous in Chepstow, but on a race day, which could suggest either coincidence or a social encounter.

Brattenbury has done what I’d have wanted to do in his place. Try to find IT consultants of doubtful honesty and link them to any of these places. No joy.

He’s also obtained guest data for the relevant dates from the airport hotel, but the names don’t correlate with anything useful, either on our own national databases or on those available via Interpol. In any case, the hotel only registers actual guests. Those who make use of the hotel’s ample conference and business facilities aren’t separately registered. Brattenbury also checked on those booking conference suites. Henderson’s name doesn’t show up, but most of the bookings are made in company names, many of which are untraceable.

Efforts to track Tinker’s money have also failed. Run into the golden sands of the Virgin Islands. Lost in the bougainvillea-scented shades of Panama and Belize.

Surveillance of Henderson has still thrown up nothing of value. He travels to London frequently. Goes abroad – Paris, Geneva, Barcelona – fairly often, but for short trips. SOCA’s surveillance guys seem to think that he doesn’t normally care if he’s followed. On occasions when he does, he is scrupulous about losing any tail before going wherever it is he goes.

On one occasion, just one, we have something which might be suggestive. It was on a day when Brattenbury’s guys were certain that he was deliberately avoiding surveillance. Drove south-west, then abruptly turned back towards Cardiff, dived off to the coast, then twisted and turned in Penarth and Grangetown until he’d burned off any tails. And yet ninety minutes after we’d lost him, he showed up again ordering lunch at a bistro in the Cardiff city center.

The sighting was completely random – one of Brattenbury’s men was getting an end-of-shift hamburger and just happened to make the identification – but the implications are interesting. Henderson had last been seen in the Cardiff Bay area. Assuming he’d spent thirty minutes doing whatever it was he was doing that day, he couldn’t have travelled more than twenty or thirty minutes from Cardiff to do it.

That’s enough time, just about, to get as far as Newport, not enough to get to Swansea. Love Newport though I do, it’s hardly a world center of sophisticated criminal activity, which suggests that whatever Henderson was up to was taking place in Cardiff … except that he might simply have changed his mind, had a call cancelling any meeting, or any other of a thousand things. To some extent, Brattenbury’s guys have been able to track Henderson’s movements prior to the bistro by reviewing CCTV footage, but the trail died in one of the little side roads off the Hayes. Another dead end.

The plain fact is that Brattenbury has discovered almost nothing of value, and shabby little Fiona Grey remains the only ace in his denuded deck.

So I sit there, on the arm of my slumbering, velour bear, sipping my tea and feeling the rain. I have a murderer and two corpses for company. The steel tip of a javelin that is travelling nowhere.

Henderson sits at my Formica table and studies my documents.

And then – it all changes. I sense it from the way Henderson looks up at me from the table. His face has a gravity in it. A weight.

‘This is good, Fiona. It’s all good.’

I don’t say anything to that. Not even a ‘thank you’. Henderson doesn’t expect one. We both know this is an introduction to something else.

‘Even Anna thinks so. I know she doesn’t always show it.’

I don’t answer.

The thing that Henderson isn’t saying is now the biggest thing in the room. Bigger than my armchair. Bigger than either of us.

‘And you’re happy with us, are you? You’ve got no complaints?’

I’m not here any more. This is Fiona Grey’s world, not mine, and it’s she who sits in her grey skirt and white child’s polycotton blouse, staring out at Henderson. She’s scared, I feel it. I think she’s right to be.

I don’t say anything and Henderson continues softly.

‘Because you’ve done well, we want to ramp it up. We want to slightly increase the work you do for us and the money too.’

My mouth moves and after a bit words come out. ‘What work?’

‘It’ll be easy enough. Nothing difficult. Like I say, we’re pleased with you.’

I have my hands crossed over my stomach. Henderson nice is more frightening than Henderson nasty.

‘You have nineteen names in your portfolio where everything is just ordinary, yes? Where you don’t yet do anything?’

Don’t answer. Just stare.

The light in the room is starting to fade. Shadows crawl out to join the twilight. Car headlights pass like alien moons.

‘It’s simple enough. We just want you to keep an eye on things. If a monthly pay slip comes past your desk and registers a change from what you’d expect, we want you to make a note of the irregularity and simply make the correction you normally would. Basically, all I’m saying is that these pay slips might start to look a bit funny from time to time and we just want you to keep an eye on them for us. Not just pay slips, but P60s, overtime forms, submissions to HMRC, anything like that. Is that clear?’

I nod. It’s very clear and if Brattenbury is listening to all this, I bet he’s nodding too. SOCA has some fancy computer experts and if they’re listening in, I bet they’re nodding most of all.

‘For the first few weeks, you’ll be seeing a bit more of me and Anna. Probably best we meet at her house. Maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays. Is that OK?’

Nod.

‘Good.’ The thing that Henderson isn’t saying is still here. A creature of these emerging shadows. He says, ‘You haven’t asked about your pay. I said I’d increase it.’

I say nothing.

He says, ‘We’ll double it. Is that fair? From right now.’

Through cracked lips: ‘What about my lawyer?’

He doesn’t hear me at first, but when he does, he says, ‘As soon as you start this new work, we’ll take you to London and you can get started with the lawyer. We’ll push things forward as quick as we can.’

My mouth opens and closes in a thank-you-ish sort of way.

‘But look. There’s one more thing. This operation involves a lot of trust and you haven’t been with us long. We like you, but I wouldn’t say we know you.’

That sounds like a formula Henderson had thought of before entering the room. He reaches for his bag. Produces a laptop. Fires up.

‘Come and sit here, please, Fiona.’

He indicates the folding metal chair he’s been sitting at. I sit as he instructs.

‘I’m sorry about this. It’s going to be a bit unpleasant, but it makes a point.’

He navigates to a video site. Calls up a clip that’s got a private listing. The clip is eight minutes long. The first three minutes show a cat fooling around in a garden. The garden looks more American than British. I assume the video’s just nicked from YouTube. A blind.

But Henderson doesn’t bother with the cat. Drags the cursor through to the start of the fourth minute, where the screen changes.

The picture is familiar and unfamiliar. It’s of Sajid Kureishi. Alive. Bound to his chair. Hands still attached to his arms. He’s talking, fast, terrified, almost incoherent.

Henderson, looking at my face, jumps to mute the sound, and Kureishi’s voice disappears.

But not his anguish. Not his astonishment.

The video is shot in close up, so nothing much is visible in the picture except Kureishi’s face, chest and arms.

Then the murder.

A few slashes with a billhook. The sort of thing used to lay hedges and slay brambles. I can’t see whoever is wielding the tool, but I do notice that Henderson isn’t looking at the screen. I don’t know what that means except perhaps that he’s more likely a murderer-for-business than a murderer-for-pleasure.

First one hand goes, then the other. Blood jets fast and horribly initially, then slows down to a flow, a trickle, a drip. Kureishi’s blood, Kureishi’s life.

I can’t look. Or sort of do, because Henderson checks to see I have my eyes on the screen, but sort of don’t too.

I discover something about myself. Me and Fiona Grey, the both of us. We hate what we’ve just seen. Hate and loathe it. Hate and loathe everything about everyone with any part in that video’s creation. It’s not the presence of death that bothers me. I enjoy the company of the dead. But murder is different and murderers are different.

I vow to myself, again, that I will see Henderson jailed for this. Him and all his brood.

Henderson murmurs, ‘This was a man who let us down. And we don’t permit that. If you do what we ask, you’ll be fine. We’ll help you leave the country. Make sure you have cash in your pocket. Some qualifications. Everything you need. If not – well, you know what happens.’

I’m in shock. Me personally, I guess, but Fiona Grey is for sure, and she’s in control here. She clasps her belly, hugs and rocks.

Even before the video has ended, before Kureishi’s life has finally dripped away, Henderson has closed the video software, deleted the file, folded the laptop.

He puts the laptop in his bag. Shifts his cup of tea – half drunk – to the sink.

He moves like an undertaker, treading softly in the silence.

I think he wants a reaction from me. Or wants to find my eye so he can say something. Fiona gives him neither option. When he pauses by the sink, she says, quietly, ‘Please leave my room. Please just go.’

He hesitates another second. Glances towards his own video-transmitter down by the skirting board. Then leaves.

The door closes with the gentleness of death.

I don’t know how long I sit there. An hour maybe, perhaps two. The violence still echoes round the room. Kureishi’s shrieks dangle from the light fittings, ricochet from the walls. Blood drips from the tap.

I’ve been present at scenes of violence before. Not as a bystander, either, but as a participant. Yet nothing has affected me like this video. It’s not just Fiona Grey who is shocked. I am too. We hug each other and rock.

I’ve wondered sometimes why I came into policing. I know I like solving puzzles. I know I like the dead. Like the comfort of rules and hierarchies, however bad I am at following their strictures. But now, I think, I’ve found the real answer. The core of it. I like this because I hate that. Have to solve crimes because I can’t abide the violence that generates them.

Whenever I close my eyes, I see the descending billhook. Those knotted brown wrists. The way it took more than one stroke to sever them.

And then Fiona, my companion Fiona, shifts from her seat. Starts shoving clothes into her only bag. She has more possessions now than will fit into that bag, so she has to be selective. This skirt, yes. That jumper, no. She takes her saucepan, mug, a couple of plastic bags of dried leaves and flowers from her cannabis plants. The yellow page of Anger and Anxiety advice from the fridge door.

The yellow page has ten tips, good ones. Developed by people who know what people like Fiona and I need. But they missed some crucial points. Tip Eleven: Do not allow murderers into your home. Tip Twelve: Do not watch footage of a recent murder. Tip Thirteen: Do not live undercover. Do not separate yourself from the people who love you. Do not reject the good advice of the man who wants to be your husband.

Tip Fourteen: Escape while you can.

Fiona puts on a cardigan, a coat, picks up her bag and leaves the apartment.

It’s still raining. It’s a forty-five minute walk to the bus station, but forty-five minutes it is.

Fiona walks steadily. On Wellington Street, a man stops her and asks for directions. She gives them. Feels something slip into her pocket. Ten minutes after the man has gone, she checks her pocket. Finds a mobile phone.

Beyond the railway line, but before the din and chaos of the bus station itself, she uses the phone to call Brattenbury. His personal mobile. He answers at the first ring.

‘Fiona, are you OK?’

‘Yes.’

He tells me that there are armed police who have me in direct view. That it’s my call if I want to ‘come in’ as he puts it.

‘I’d quite like to nail this fucker, sir. And all his fucker friends.’

That doesn’t quite sound like my voice, but it’s close enough.

‘Yes. I would too. What’s your plan?’

There are a couple of options. Basically: go walkabout and come back again. Or just go walkabout.

I argue for the latter. ‘At the moment they trust me about eighty or ninety per cent. We’ve got to get them to a straight one hundred. We can’t leave them in any doubt.’

He agrees. Since the mole has been arrested at Fielding Insurance, we believe that I’m the only payroll insider that Tinker still has. They need me. And we need them to trust me.

‘Do you know where you want to go?’

I do. It has to be somewhere I can be traced. I say what I’m proposing.

‘Ah yes. And you had an employment reference from them, didn’t you?’

‘Two, actually. One for my cleaning job, one for payroll. And I left my iPad in my room. That’ll have my application letter on it.’

‘Perfect. Go for it.’

I say, ‘Those nineteen names. I think we know what they’re up to now.’

‘You think? I’m not sure. But we’ll see. Good luck, Fiona. Take care, stay safe.’

I walk into the bus station. Buy some fast food. Eat some of it. Put the phone into the paper bag with the remains of my meal and throw the whole lot away.

There’s a bus leaving for London in five minutes. I buy a ticket, sit at the back.

We pull out of the city on sodden roads. Midnight tarmac spins endlessly from our departing tires. Black water plunging to the sea.