32.

I don’t know how long I’m in that car. I can’t check my watch, because my head is hooded and because my watch is in a dustbin liner in Quintrell’s bedroom.

But after perhaps fifteen minutes of city traffic, Henderson says, ‘We’re going to leave this car and enter a second vehicle. I’m going to open your door. I’m going to escort you to that other vehicle. You will get inside and wait until we move off again. Is that clear?’

I say, ‘Yes.’

My door opens and I get out, Henderson’s hand on my upper arm. There’s a brief rush of city air: sooty and warm. There’s a buzz of traffic noise, but the buzz has a hard quality to it, a compactness, which makes me think we’re in a narrow alley, or something like it. Something tucked away, out of sight. We walk a few paces and Henderson guides my hand to the roof of the car and an open door. I get inside. He says, ‘Please lie,’ and I do. I feel him on the rear seats beside me, also lying. The car moves off again. Quintrell, presumably, at the wheel.

It’s a sweet move.

A black BMW with a male driver enters a little side street. Some completely different vehicle exits with a woman at the wheel. No passengers visible. It’s not the kind of move which defeats all opposition, but you either need a stroke of luck – a fortuitous sightline, a tiny slip by those executing the maneuver – or highly intrusive surveillance. Brattenbury can’t risk the latter, and is unlikely to benefit from the former. As it happens, I know that Brattenbury won’t bother with more than cursory surveillance. Nothing out of the normal, that’s the watchword now.

After a bit, I can feel Henderson raise his head. He’ll be checking for any tail. He gives Quintrell brief, clipped instructions – ‘Go left here. Stop. Move off. You see that side road coming up after the lights? Make a sudden turn into the road, and drive fast for a hundred yards.’ I feel the car swaying to his command.

After a while, he’s satisfied. ‘We’re clear,’ he announces. ‘You can pull over.’

The car stops. Quintrell gets out and sits next to me in the back. I hear her fixing screens to the windows. Don’t want the little hooded girl attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Henderson is about to take the wheel, but first he tells me, ‘I’m going to give you something to listen to. What do you like listening to?’

‘Anything.’

‘OK. Stereophonics maybe? We’ll start with that. Lean forwards, please.’

I lean forward. Quintrell arranges a headband on me that contains speakers over the ears. The music comes out way too loud at first. I complain and Quintrell adjusts the settings a bit, puts the thing on shuffle.

It’s still loud, though. I can hear almost nothing else. I lose touch with the movement of the car too, whether it’s fast or slow, jerky or not. In my altered world, I can only feel my breath fingering the folds of black cotton, the pressure of the eye-mask, the clamor of some indie rockers from the Valleys.

I think, For all I know, Henderson knows who I am.

I think, For all I know, he is taking me away to kill me.

I can’t connect with those thoughts, though. Not really. Can’t connect with anything much. Not Brattenbury. Not Buzz. Not my real mission here. So I let my thoughts go wherever they feel most comfortable and that turns out to be a Fiona Grey place, not a me place. I think of my time with Amina. Her saying, ‘We are sisters now,’ as she turned out the light. Think of my lecherous lawyer, George Noble, and the visa he will secure.

Speech therapy? I’ve looked at those books which Henderson brought me and I like them. If I wanted, at the end of this, I could make a new life for myself in New Zealand, teaching disabled kids to practice saying la-la-la and ta-ta-ta. That idea doesn’t feel ridiculous. Part of me wants it. Part of me is already there. A small, clean office in a small, clean town. Green hills on the horizon and rugby burbling from the radio.

La-la-la.

Ta-ta-ta.

And again, please. La-la-la. Ta-ta-ta. One more time.

I don’t try to read direction from the movements of the car. For one thing, I can’t. For another thing, I already know where I’m going, or assume I do.

As soon as Henderson started talking about bringing me ‘into the center of this project’, I told Brattenbury. He checked flights in and out of Bangalore. Checked bookings for hotel and conference centers within a thirty-minute perimeter of Heathrow.

Easy pickings. Henderson had booked another conference suite in another Heathrow hotel, taking it for five days, and had called to check such things as availability of sufficient power points and the existence of a secure data connection. He’d also booked hotel rooms for himself plus four at a second hotel a few minutes’ drive away.

Brattenbury is working now to have the hotel rooms and conference suite wired for sound and images. He’s planted SOCA operatives acting as maids and waiters. He’s got the hotel managements to agree to share their booking data with him. If they hadn’t agreed, he’d have secured a warrant.

I wonder if Brattenbury has told those managements what the firearms boys of SCO19 might do to their daintily manicured conference suites. I’m guessing not.

Brattenbury told me: ‘As far as you can, Fiona, just relax. We’ve done this before. We’re not expecting armed resistance. And in any case, we will move in with overwhelming force.’

I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘They may seek to intimidate or threaten you. They may wish to remind you of Sajid Kureishi and what happens to those who cross them. But you have nothing to fear. They need your expertise. This is the endgame now.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Remember that these people are highly security conscious, so please don’t be concerned if they take precautions.’

‘No, sir.’

Precautions. Being stripped. An intimate skin, hair and cavity search. A change of clothes. Eye-mask. Hood. A switch of cars. Rock music. Please don’t be concerned.

I’m not concerned.

Not concerned, that is, until after some hours have, I guess, passed. Enough hours, easily, to get us to Heathrow. We left Pontcanna at half past two, so it must be after six now, perhaps well after.

Then the going changes abruptly. A couple of steep ascents. Hard bends in the road. A left turn onto a rough surface. Too rough for tarmac, no matter how potholed. A country track. At one point Henderson misjudges something and the car bottom scrapes on something hard. In a gap between tracks, I hear Henderson swear softly. Quintrell starts to say something, but Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics starts to tell me, yet again, about laying back, head on the grass, and I can’t hear anything more.

The car stops.

Doors bang open and closed. Henderson removes the headphones from me and says, ‘We’re here. Are you OK?’

‘Do I have to listen to any more Stereophonics?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’m OK.’

The noise and the sightlessness has disoriented me. I can feel my voice is clumsy. Not my own.

Henderson tells me that he’s going to lead me inside. It’s not just my voice which is clumsy. It’s my movements too. I clamber out OK, but have pins and needles in my thigh and ask to lean against the car, waiting for feeling to return.

As we stand there, a fox yelps somewhere in the silence. A bird breaks cover from a tree. I hear its heavy flapping overhead. There is no engine noise, no jets.

Either Heathrow has decided to close its flight paths down for the day or we aren’t within a hundred miles of the place and Adrian Brattenbury has no idea where I am.

Please don’t be concerned.

Then, when I’m ready, Henderson takes me by an arm and leads me over to a door. We go inside and down a few steps. Henderson asks me to sit and I lower myself gingerly on what turns out to be a soft surface, a sofa or bed.

‘Lean forward, please.’

I lower my head. The movement bares the nape of my neck. Vertebrae forming landing lights for the executioner’s axe, the murderer’s billhook.

No axe, no billhook.

Henderson fiddles with the pullcord, catches my hair, apologizes, undoes the knot. Removes hood and eye-mask.

There’s way too much light around me and I immediately close my eyes. Henderson rubs the top of my back. ‘OK, take your time. I know these things are disorienting, believe me. Just say if you want anything to eat or drink.’

I do take my time and slowly make sense of my surroundings.

I’m in a small white-painted room, no phone, no windows. There’s a bed, on which I’m now sitting, a bedside table, a lamp, a chest of drawers, a small sink. There’s a glass vase containing daffodils by the bed. I touch them: they’re real, not fake. The bed has clean linen, a set of folded towels, a bathrobe. On the chest of drawers, there is a packet of clean underwear, a couple of T-shirts, socks. Also a toothbrush, toothpaste, two bars of that tiny paper-wrapped hotel soap, and some pale green shampoo in a clear plastic bottle.

I stand up, move around, recover my senses. The T-shirts are in XS, my size. I open the shampoo and sniff. It smells of apple.

‘Apple,’ I say.

Henderson watches me reorder myself. Says, ‘This is your room. Anna will be staying just next to you.’ He taps the wall. ‘The accommodation here is fairly basic, but if there’s anything you want or need, please ask and we will try to provide it. Toilet and shower room here.’ He leads me upstairs. ‘Exercise room. More bedrooms through there. Common room here.’

The ‘common room’ is painted white, beige carpet. Chairs and sofas. A TV screen. Some books and magazines. A little kitchenette with tea and coffee things, a little sink. Bottles of water. A wicker basket that contains small plastic packets of biscuits. There are more flowers here. More daffs. No windows.

At the head of the little flight of steps, commanding the front door, there’s a man in an old flannel shirt and a leather jacket. He is reading the Sun. He is developing a slight paunch, but is otherwise muscled and tough-looking. On a little table beside him, he has a cup of tea, some lo-cal sweeteners, two chocolate digestives, and a pistol.

I don’t know much about guns, but I think this is a Glock, a standard police weapon.

I don’t know much about lo-cal sweeteners, but I do know they’re less effective when taken with chocolate digestives.

‘This is Geoff,’ says Henderson. ‘He’s here to look after us.’

Geoff waves a hand. Quintrell – who’s changed into a knee-length black dress – exits her room, trots upstairs, and goes through a big wooden door, which leads I don’t know where.

Something clicks. Back at her house, when I was getting ready to strip, I was struck by her clothes. Jeans and a jumper. Not the sort of thing that a woman like Quintrell would have worn to a big business meeting in a Heathrow hotel. She’s attached to her own self-image as a professional woman. She’d have worn a skirt or a dress. Heels. A trouser suit at the very minimum. Quintrell’s initial outfit tells me that we’re in proper countryside. Not some golf-club-’n’-country-club version of the countryside either, but the real thing. A place with farm animals, ditches, bad tracks and muck.

We will move in with overwhelming force, Brattenbury promised me, but he probably didn’t know how easy a promise it would be to keep. How much force do you need to overwhelm an empty conference room? How many men needed to arrest a room full of absences?

Please don’t be concerned.

‘Am I in prison?’ I ask, which isn’t a very eloquent way to phrase the question, but is the way it comes out.

‘The meeting rooms are through here,’ says Henderson. ‘Your presence there will be required off and on over the next few days. Meals will be served either there or in the common room. You’ll find that the windows are all shuttered. I request that you do not make any attempt to look out of them. Also that you do not go outside. Is that clear?’

‘You mean “yes”. That’s the answer to my question.’

‘The answer to your question is “no”. You will be here for a few days, then we will return you to Cardiff. While you are here, we ask you to respect a few rules. That’s all.’

He asks if I want anything. I say I want to shower, then eat. He tells me that Geoff will sort me out. He’s impatient to get away. I can hear voices and footfall from the door that Quintrell went through. The occasional burst of noisy laughter. Henderson has not been unkind particularly, but my claims on his patience are expiring fast.

I let him go.

I ask Geoff about food. He produces a menu. Scrambled egg. Ditto, with bacon, sausage and tomato. A range of sandwiches. Soup of the day.

‘Soup of the day?’ I say. ‘What is this place?’

‘Soup today was parsnip. Didn’t taste of much, I don’t think. They do a good sandwich though. They do chips too, if you want them.’

I ask for a sandwich, some salad, no chips. He calls someone with my order. An intercom thing, not an external line. There are no external lines here that I’ve seen. No mobile phones either. ‘Give it twenty minutes,’ he advises. ‘They’ve got their hands full at the moment.’

I get a towel from my bed and go to the shower room.

After a few hours with my head in that hood, my breath hanging wet and foggy around my cheeks, I feel clammy and unclean. I spend ten minutes under the shower. A blast of warm water and soap. Wash my hair and dry it with one of those built-in dryers that hotels have.

Stare at myself in the mirror.

Fiona Grey, looking vaguely sporty in her pale grey trackies and white T-shirt. Hair longer than I’m used to. A face that means nothing to me, or nothing I can read anyway.

We look at each other through the glass for a while, then grow bored.

I go off to find Geoff.

Ask if he has a ciggy. He says no, and the common room is no smoking. But he says can get me some ciggies and there’s a small room where I can smoke.

Ask if there’s any chance of getting some weed. He laughs and says, ‘Doubt it.’

I say, ‘What time is it?’

He checks his watch – not disguising the dial – and says coming up to nine o’clock. That’s more than six hours after we left Quintrell’s house. Enough time to have gone pretty much anywhere in England or Wales. Time enough to reach southern Scotland.

Geoff says, ‘It’s weird, isn’t it, not knowing the time. Gets you disoriented.’

He also says, dropping his voice, ‘And just so you know, I’m Special Branch. Here to keep an eye on you. Any problems, I’m on it.’

I don’t say much to that. My sandwich comes. There’s a knock at the door, Geoff enters a passcode to open it, deals with whoever’s at the door. The food arrives on a tray that someone’s nicked from MacDonald’s. It’s a ‘club’ sandwich, which turns out to mean chicken, bacon and some bits of salad.

I eat. Drink some water. Read about speech therapy.

Then Geoff goes off for a pee, taking his Glock with him when he goes. I lope out of the common room, through the doors that Quintrell and Henderson both used.

Emerge into a large, converted barn. Stone walls, partially exposed. Huge timber beams. A fancy wooden atrium, double doors beyond, shading the noise of a dozen or more voices. I open the door. A sudden loudening of the conversation. Some Indian faces. White ones. A couple of waitresses, dressed in black, holding trays, but also standing close to each other. Village girls, I guess. Not pros. Close to each other, because they’re not used to this kind of thing and are buddying up for mutual support.

No one really notices my entry, except the waitresses. One of them offers me a drink, the other a tray of canapés. I ignore the canapés, take a glass of red wine.

Quintrell is close to me, but is standing with her back to me, talking to an Indian guy in a suit. Henderson is the far side of the room, side on to me. I don’t really notice the room itself. Just have an impression of it. One impressive stone wall. A big fireplace with a log fire crackling away. Copper wall lamps, expensive-looking. A couple of big timber pillars, supporting a gallery. Raw oak. Everything fancy.

I push through the people to Henderson. I don’t think he sees me, as such, just sees movement in his peripheral vision, turns to check it. He’s wearing a dark suit, white shirt, silk tie.

‘Fiona,’ he says, or starts to say.

Might have said more, except that by this time I’ve thrown my red wine in his face. My glass too.

Leaped at him.

Kicking. Hitting. Scratching. Biting.

This isn’t fighting the way my friend Lev taught me. There’s no science in this, no carefully gauged aggression. This is strictly playground stuff. Fiona Grey keeps her nails fairly long, and I feel them drag down Henderson’s cheek. Feel her fist knot in his thinning hair.

I’m shouting too. She is, or I am. I don’t know. We’re not always so separate. A stream of swearwords mostly. Nothing very inventive. ‘You stupid fucking buggering shit-wanker.’ That sort of thing.

Henderson doesn’t resist much. That is: he protects himself from my assault but doesn’t seek to harm me back. Any billhook action is strictly off limits. But this fight is eighteen-to-one, and I’m the one.

My left arm is yanked from behind. Yanked and twisted. My right arm is also seized. A forearm closes over my throat and darkness instantly starts to overtake me.

I’m aware that my legs are thrashing. Kicking out at anything I can reach. But my shoes are soft and can’t do much damage. In any case, my legs too are pinioned. Geoff materializes beside me. Passes his pistol to Henderson, who holds it loosely. Geoff cuffs my wrists behind my back. Someone forces me down into a chair. The person who was choking me removes their hold and light starts to return to my world.

A world of confusion.

Henderson is dabbing his cheeks with a paper napkin. Has wine everywhere. But there’s blood on him as well as wine, and I realize that a fair bit of the blood is mine. I think I cut myself on the wine glass somehow. In any case, I’ve got a gash on my knees and a graze all down my forearm. My joints scream from their various pummelings.

The confusion isn’t merely physical. There’s a ripple of social confusion too. It’s not every cocktail party which is enlivened by unexpected assault, and at first people aren’t sure how to react. I’m fairly sure that while I was being choked someone swiped me hard across the face. A backhand slap that seemed to loosen the teeth in my mouth. But I can also see that my actions have provoked amusement. Henderson is too suave to be your classic bruiser, but he knows how to handle himself and he was never at great physical risk from a girl who takes her T-shirts in size XS. A couple of the Indians are laughing openly at me and speaking to each other in some language other than English. There’s a circle of faces, checking that Henderson is OK, rebuking me in different accents, and laughing.

One of the waitresses tiptoes into the circle. Starts mopping up wine and broken glass with kitchen towel and a plastic dustpan. She doesn’t catch my eye. When her efforts to clean up start flicking round my feet, someone drags my chair backwards and me with it.

I say, sulkily, through a swelling lip, ‘We’re all fucked. You know that? That guy there’ – I’m nodding at Geoff – ‘he’s a pig. Special Branch. You think you’re all so clever with the strip searches and bollocks, and you let a fucking copper right into your stupid fucking meeting.’

There’s more. I say more. But I don’t really know what. Fiona Grey doesn’t cry any more than I do, but she’s distraught. As far as she sees the world, everything’s just turned to shit. Instead of speech therapy, New Zealand, and a pocketful of cash, she’s looking at a prison sentence, investigation by the Manchester police, and no chance of ever emigrating.

As I speak, more to myself than anyone else, hair falling in front of my face, I become aware of Henderson’s voice saying, ‘Fiona. Fiona.’

I don’t respond, or not properly. Just kick out, catch his shin, swear some more.

So he slaps me. Hard.

Hard enough I’m half thrown from my chair. I might even fall, except that someone has my handcuffed wrists in their grip and their hold steadies me.

This time I feel blood in my mouth and there’s enough force in the blow that I don’t want another.

I just mumble, ‘Fuck off,’ and try to turn away.

But Henderson’s not for turning. Staying clear of my legs, he tells me that Geoff is not Special Branch. That he’s assigned to tell all newcomers the same thing. That it’s a test of loyalty. That I should have calmly reported the comment to him, Henderson, at the next opportunity. That instead, I have caused an unnecessary drama and, he manages to indicate, a good bit of damage to a decent suit.

He says these things with a quiet, emphatic force. As though telling me these things were a slightly less flavorsome version of hitting me.

‘Do you understand what I’m telling you? Geoff, will you please tell Fiona that you are not a policeman working undercover.’

Geoff does as he’s asked, and other people weigh in too. The consensus in the room is that I overreacted wildly. That I somehow owe an apology to them all for interrupting their precious party. For damaging something as beautiful and valuable as Vic Henderson’s Italian grey suit.

At the same time, as it becomes clearer that I am not a threat, that no one has been hurt, that this whole thing has been the most temporary of tempests, I become the very best form of party entertainment: a thing of merriment. A person that everyone can ridicule without breaching etiquette. One of the Indian guys is re-enacting my assault, with explosions of laughter from those around him. Quintrell’s face is a study of dislike and contempt.

And then – it’s all over. Geoff releases me from my handcuffs. A waitress brings kitchen towel for me to wipe at. Henderson and I shake hands. Someone gives me a glass of white wine, which I neither drink nor use as a weapon.

One of the waitresses offers me a canapé.

I say, ‘Is there any blood on my face?’

She says, ‘A bit,’ and helps me wipe it off. I say I made a bit of a fool of myself. She tells me not to worry, no harm done. I ask her for a packet of cigarettes and she’ll say she’ll see what she can do.

Her accent is Welsh, for sure, but not Cardiff, and not North Wales. The accent of the Valleys is a bit different from the accents you hear further into Wales, Powys and Ceredigion, and I think her accent isn’t Valleys, but I wouldn’t swear to it. We don’t talk for all that long.

I try standing up, but feel wobbly, so sit back down.

I’m in sports shoes, T-shirt and trackie bottoms. The men here – and it’s mostly men – are, apart from Geoff, all in suits and ties. Quintrell is in black dress and clicky heels. Also she doesn’t have blood, wine and glass all over her clothes.

Henderson goes off to change. When he returns, he introduces me to a man who calls himself Ramesh.

‘Ram is leading the software side of things,’ Henderson says. ‘He’s going to need your operational knowledge to make sure we get a really robust system. Garbage in, garbage out, right, Ram?’

Ramesh shakes my hand and laughs at me some more. I think the laughter is meant to be jovial and inclusive, but it doesn’t feel that way.

Then the waitress comes with cigarettes and matches. I say thanks, smile at Ramesh and leave. The waitress points out the smoking room for me, but then enters a code on the keypad next to the main door, releases the lock and leaves. I slip out after her, in the wake of the closing door. I don’t want to sit indoors in some shuttered room and Fiona Grey doesn’t either. It’s been a rough day for us both.

So we just sit outside on the steps to the barn. The sun has set, but a summer twilight still hovers in the trees. There’s a big farmhouse to the right, with some windows lit up, but the view from the barn is mostly of a cobbled courtyard, some old agricultural buildings, and trees. Oak. Ash. A punky fringe of hawthorn. Over in the distance somewhere, I can just see the top lamp of a telecoms tower, a red beacon in the night.

The steps to the barn are a reddish sandstone, flaking at the edges. I play with the stone and break off a flake. Pocket it. Get stone dust under my nails.

I smoke.

Fiona Griffiths never used to smoke much. Weed often, tobacco almost never. Fiona Grey is a bit different. Less weed, more tobacco. I wonder vaguely if I’ll ever kick her habit.

The party behind me begins to break up. People start exiting the barn.

I guess the barn itself only accommodates lower-level staff. The more important, or more trusted, members of the team are in the farmhouse itself. Quintrell, for all her airs, is strictly servant class, like me.

I also wonder about the party I just witnessed.

When I entered the room, I didn’t look around much. Just sought out Henderson and attacked him. But I had an impression of numbers. Numbers, and the mix between white faces and brown. At a rough guess, and excluding the waitresses, I reckon there were about twenty people, with around two white faces for every brown one. By the time the Fiona-’n’-Vic show was over, however, I’d say the room was significantly emptier, with about equal numbers of British and Indian faces. I’ve also something of a suspicion that Henderson’s attention was only partly on me, through all that fight scene. I think he was also looking elsewhere, checking that the people who had to vacate the room because of my intrusive presence were indeed vacating.

I’ve got a feeling that Allan, the Astra-man, was present in the room. It would make sense.

I smoke another cigarette.

I can hear the churring of a nightjar. The distant movement of farm machinery.

Henderson materializes behind me. I’m disobeying his instructions and I think he’s hesitating about how to react.

Gently, is the answer.

He sits beside me and I offer him a cigarette. He lights it from the glowing tip of mine.

‘Bit of a show back there,’ he comments.

‘Sorry.’

‘Well, I’m sorry too. Sorry for hitting you. I didn’t need to do that.’

I shrug. ‘I hit you.’

‘Well, sorry anyway.’

‘I’ve had worse,’ I say, and Fiona Grey has. Much worse.

We smoke awhile, without conversation.

Beyond the telecoms tower, and to the right, a low moon appears between loose cloud.

‘What’s the time?’ I ask.

‘Quarter to eleven. Bedtime, almost. We start early.’

‘Vic?’

‘Yes?’

‘I want to go home. Sorry. I don’t think I fit here. I can’t do what you want me to do.’

Vic looks at me in the moonlight.

Reaches out and draws me to him. An arm round my shoulder, pressing me against his warmth. He kisses me softly on the top of my head.

‘You’re fine, Fiona. What you did in there—’

‘It’s not just that. It’s everything. I should have said when you first came. When I left Manchester, I wanted to change my life. I wanted to be different.’

He kisses me again. A kiss that could easily be paternal. Or ex-boyfriendy. A kiss which is intimate but also respectful of boundaries. Yet I think he’s angling for more. I think if I turned my face up to his, turned my lips up to his, I could drink from that well as deep as I liked.

I’m tempted. Not just Fiona Grey, but me too. I feel a good old-fashioned desire tugging at me in this soft summer night. My once-a-month conjugal visits with Buzz feel as distant as fairy tales. I lean into Henderson, my head against his shoulder. Enjoying his presence, but keeping the barriers up.

No well-drinking for me tonight.

He’s been holding his cigarette away from me during this, now takes one last drag and stubs it out. He’s not really a smoker, I don’t think. He’s smoked barely half the cigarette and when he stubs it, he has an odd action, one which breaks the cigarette where the tobacco meets the filter. In the hostel, someone would pick up the unsmoked tobacco for a roll-up. I can feel myself wanting to do the same.

‘Fiona, I don’t think you realize how much we depend on you. We’ve had other people doing what you do, but you’re the only one who really gets it. The other day with Anna, when you had those disagreements with her, you were always right. We need that woman. We need you.’

‘Sorry, Vic. But I’ve made up my mind. I do want to go home. I won’t tell anyone about anything. I don’t want to cause trouble.’

We argue a bit. He says he can’t let me go home. That there’s no one to take me. I say I can’t face meeting all the people who were laughing at me this evening. Say I hate my clothes. That they make me feel like riff-raff amongst all those suits. The laughing stock.

‘They weren’t laughing at you …’ he starts.

‘They were. You know they were.’

‘Look, they haven’t met you yet. They don’t know how good you are.’

‘They’ll still laugh. Look at me.’

‘We can get you clothes.’

‘You already did. You got me horrible polycotton tracksuit trousers that don’t fit.’

Vic sighs. ‘Look, give me a list of stuff you want. I’ll get one of the girls to get it for you.’

He means one of the waitresses.

I don’t give way too soon, and it takes another cigarette and another kiss on the dome of my head before he shifts from the step. When he does, he crosses the moonlit yard to the farmhouse. Comes back five minutes later with the waitress. Pen and paper.

I shoo Henderson away and go through stuff I want with the waitress. I know I’m not allowed to ask her what town we’re near, and know Henderson will check, so I just say, ‘There’s a Gap in town is there?’ and the girl, Nia, hesitates a moment, then says, Yes, she should think so.

We make a list. I want a dress, some tights, some smart shoes. Trousers. Skirt. Two or three different tops. I give my sizes. The dress, I say, has to be in petite. That the full size ones never fit me. I say I need something for smart, something for more relaxed.

Nia is helpful actually. Sounds like she used to work as a shop assistant. When we have a list, we OK it with Henderson. It’ll be three or four hundred quid, I would guess, but separate a girl from her wardrobe and you pay the price. He accepts my request with one of those patient male sighs.

Nia goes.

Henderson says, ‘Feel ready for tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll be fine. You’ll be great, actually.’

‘If anyone is horrible to me while I’m here, I’ll walk out.’

Henderson gives me a look which I decode as meaning, ‘If you walk out of here, I will kill you.’ Perhaps there’s also a whiff of, ‘And I’d regret that, because I enjoyed our moment on the step.’

I say, ‘Where are we anyway?’

He waves his hand at the night. ‘Somewhere in the universe. Does it matter?’

‘Not really.’ I put my hands on his shoulder, in that intimate/not-intimate ex-girlfriend way, and give him a light kiss on his cheek. There’s a long rip on his left hand cheek, ending with a flap of skin and some thickly clotted tissue, dark as ox-blood. My handiwork. ‘Thank you for being nice to me.’

He rubs my arm and says goodnight.

I turn to go in. Henderson isn’t about to follow. He’s with the big boys in the farmhouse.

‘Don’t come out here again, please. We need you to stay in the barn. This evening was a one-off.’

I nod.

My submissive nod. My obedient one.

That’s the thing about we battered women. Our ‘stop’ never really means ‘stop’. The average victim of domestic violence suffers thirty assaults before she reports anything and that number is only a guess. It could easily be much more. Henderson’s technique – hit then kiss – is the abuser’s way to maintain control. And Fiona Grey is under control again. She’s going to see out her time here, good as gold.