34.

Those meetings! Like nothing else I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps it’s always like this in the private sector. The suits. The agendas. The two types of bottled water and the thermoses of hot drinks.

There are eight of us in total. Ramesh has three colleagues with him, but he is clearly the most senior. All four speak good English. I know nothing about IT, but clearly these guys do. Clear too that they have further programmers back in Bangalore. We’re seeing the gleam of helmets, not the entire battle force.

Then there are two British guys. One, a Londoner, who calls himself Terry. Late thirties, early forties. Short hair, black shirt, a suit which probably cost a lot of money, and a gold watch which is almost certainly some expensive branded thing. Then we are also, occasionally, graced with the presence of James Wyatt. He calls himself Phil but I recognize him from the surveillance photos on our system. He tells us that he is mostly on the finance side. That he’s just here to chip in, if he can help. That he doesn’t understand all the ‘techie stuff’.

He pretends to be modest, but really his intention is to emphasize that he’s in finance, a holy land altogether higher and finer than the swamplands of IT. What he would think of Fiona Grey’s habitat of payroll clerking and homeless shelters, I can’t even imagine. He wears a striped blue shirt with an all-white collar. He has a handkerchief that matches his tie. I think, Fuck you too, Jimmy boy. Think how well that tie-and-hanky combo will go down in a Category A all-male clink. And fuck you too.

Ramesh and gang are the programmers-in-chief. Terry is there to manage and direct. ‘Specify, program, beta-launch, full launch. And test, test, test, test.’ Terry’s phrase. As far as I can tell we’re mid beta-launch. Those nineteen payroll accounts which I’ve been monitoring are the dummy run. Something much bigger lies beyond them.

Quintrell and I hear endless talk about field selection, dummy classes, remote users, filter value resets, UI objects, array correlations, and pagination widgets. People say things to each other like, ‘but if the MySQL data is firewalled, we might have to dehash the passwords.’ There’s are occasionally little linguistic misunderstandings between the Indian and British sides of the room, but Ramesh – or Ram, as everyone calls him – normally grasps these things first, then explains whatever it is rapidly to his colleagues in whatever language it is they speak. Not Hindi, I think. I don’t think Hindi goes that far south, so maybe Tamil or Kannada or some language I’ve never heard of.

Quintrell doesn’t understand the IT talk any more than I do. We just let it wash by us, picnickers on the riverbank. But often enough, Terry or Ram will request clarification of something. How does HMRC handle maternity leave, if notification of that leave is delayed for some reason? If insufficient tax has been paid, is the amount owing recouped as a one-off thing or via the next year’s tax coding? And precisely when are PAYE coding notices sent out and who specifically receives them?

Quintrell has her answer. I have mine. But we work together. She’ll say something like, ‘Well, the technically correct answer here would be …’ And I say things like, ‘Anna’s absolutely right of course, but I suppose that in practice …’

We sit side by side, support each other’s answers, and pour water for each other. Although my first appearance arouses a prickle of remembered laughter, that soon dissipates under the pressure of work and, perhaps, my more businesslike appearance. Before long, Ram accepts me as part of the team, every bit as important as Quintrell herself. He calls us ‘our lady experts’ and, twice, ‘our beautiful lady experts’. That sounds creepy, but he means it courteously, and neither Quintrell nor I are in the mood to be all feminist about these things, so we just do our best to be beautiful and expert all at once, and Quintrell at least does a good job on both fronts. She has lovely hair and good skin.

From time to time, Henderson enters the room, and just lounges around on one of the chairs at the side. If it’s not him, it’s usually Geoff. And if it’s neither of those two, then it is indeed the man calling himself Allan Wiley. All three men are clearly part of the security group, but it seems to me that Henderson is the boss of this little unit.

I wonder if there are more of them than just these three. I’m thinking yes.

During our meetings, it’s rare that Henderson or either of the others interjects, but when they do, it’s always with a reminder about avoiding attention. At one point, a particular conversation led to one of the Indian guys saying, ‘Yes, but ninety-nine point something of data returns are going to look fine. We’ll get one or two weird results, that’s all.’ Henderson, who was in the room at the time, barked, ‘That’s exactly what we can’t have. No weird results ever. That’s the kind of thing that generates a call back to the software vendors, which we absolutely have to avoid.’

That line – ‘no weird results ever’ – becomes our slogan. A good slogan too. An important one. Because our aim, which I now understand properly for the first time, is breathtakingly audacious.

The family of software packages we’re working with – Total Payroll Solutions, or TPS – is the most widely used payroll system in the UK and, by far, the one most used by large corporations. Terry tells us that, in rough terms, the wages and salaries paid via TPS amount to about £170 billion. ‘At least that,’ he says. ‘At least.’

That money has to be split up amongst millions of different employees, has to be apportioned out in tax and national insurance and everything else. Money that gets paid out, on time, in the correct amounts, all across the country. It’s money that families depend on. The lifeblood of the economy, no less.

Henderson and his merry men aim to subvert that happy system. They aim to distribute a version of the software that almost exactly replicates the real thing, but which introduces what Terry and Ram are calling a ‘skim’. If a company uses the software Ram and his guys are producing, they will see a tax bill that is very slightly too high. HMRC will see one that is very slightly too low. The payment system built into the software will skim the difference. The amount of the skim hasn’t yet been finally settled, but it looks likely to be as little as one half of one tenth of one per cent of total payroll.

A skim that tiny might sound too small to be worth bothering with, but apply that to nigh on two hundred billion and you’re talking almost a hundred million pounds. That’s a hundred million per annum, a cool two million a week.

How long would it take a company to notice that it was being diddled? I’m not sure. I’m not an auditor and don’t have that kind of experience. But I do know that my team at Western Vale would never spot it. We look for obvious mistakes not tiny little rounding errors. My old superstore buddy, Sir Kevin the Bold of Swindon, said the same thing. It took his firm eighteen months to notice a major error and Kevin was neither idle nor incompetent.

Nor do I think the taxman would notice the missing money. To a weirdly huge degree, the British system operates on trust. If a company’s numbers look like they’re in order, HMRC seldom carries out any major investigation. And if they do investigate, they’re looking for major fraud or gross incompetence. HMRC just doesn’t have the resources to tease out a half of a tenth of a one per cent error in the data. It doesn’t have the time, the staff or even the desire. Yet when you think about it, the crime being contemplated is breathtaking. So audacious, yet so simple in design and concept that you simply have to stand back and applaud its creators.

Applaud, then arrest them.

The system will also have what Terry calls a ‘Fuck It button’. Basically, if it looks like the scam is busted, there’ll be a feature which will allow a remote user to ramp the skim up to a full hundred per cent of all salary and taxes due. There’s no way that either HMRC or any company would fail to notice that kind of rip-off. Any half-alert corporate would just rip the plug out of their central server and suspend all payments until the problem was identified and solved. But even if you had just a day or two in between hitting the Fuck It button and getting closed down completely, the amount of money you could steal in that time could easily be in eight digits. Maybe nine.

The hundred million pound heist.

I’m looking at the Mona Lisa of theft. The Hamlet. The Beethoven’s Ninth.

I remember our original planning meeting at Cathays. The one with Jackson, Brattenbury, the DCI from Devon and Cornwall, and the little twerp from the SFO. The SFO guy said, ‘We’re not really equipped to handle frauds of less than a million or so.’ He said, ‘We have to ask, is this case likely to be of widespread public concern?’

Stupid fucker.

Stupid arrogant SFO fucker.

I think Kureishi was lucky to last as long as he did. I think I’ve been lucky, for that matter. With stakes like this, lives look cheap. This fraud, if it comes to fruition, will be by far the largest ever executed in Britain. Probably the world.

Our beautiful lady experts.

Please don’t be concerned.

The little mystery of my portfolio of names – the twenty-nine fake names, the nineteen real ones – is also solved. The twenty-nine fake names were simply a way to generate enough money to cover this group’s operating expenses. Not just the money I helped steal, but the money stolen by the various other payroll moles. All that was simply a way to raise the working capital. A temporary, regrettable expedient.

The nineteen other names were, however, the more important ones. Although in those cases there were real employees, drawing real salaries and paying real taxes, their pay slips and so on were being generated not by the real version of the TPS software, but by Tinker’s rip-off version. I needed to monitor the results so that any errors in the software could be immediately checked and corrected.

I’m finally seeing the full scale of the crime whose gathering shadow I’ve been living in for so long. Finally understanding who and what we’re up against. I also realize that if my colleagues and I ever allow Henderson and friends to hit their Fuck It button, we’ll be guilty of permitting the greatest crime on earth to take place under our noses. We have to let things run far enough that we can round up the perpetrators, but not so far that they can launch their attack. Like watching terrorists. The same delicate clockwork of risk.

The work is intense, and the schedule relentless. We work from twelve to two, break for sandwiches. Then two-thirty to five. Break for tea and biscuits. Then five-thirty to eight. The group had been running for three hours before Quintrell and I joined it.

Because our group is the largest one, we get the biggest and nicest room: the same one in which I caused a scene yesterday. When I’m bored by the talk of dummy classes and UI objects, I gaze around. That raw oak, stone wall, copper lamp thing is nice. Quietly expensive. Tasteful.

But there are other groups running elsewhere. There’s one upstairs, because people come and go in the gallery above our heads. Sometimes stand there talking quietly and casting glances down at us. That’s the ‘distribution’ group, I think. At times, one or two of Ram’s boys go to join the distribution people upstairs, because product design and distribution need to be carefully coordinated.

I don’t see anything of the finance and security meetings. I think they take place in the farmhouse. I’m pretty sure that my earlier suspicion is correct: that only the those in the innermost circle are allowed into the farmhouse.

And who is in the inner group? The million dollar question.

The annoying thing is that I probably saw them. I think they were here, in this room, yesterday: the handful of white faces who left the room when I burst in. The people whose absence was important enough that Henderson was checking that they were vacating even when I was ripping chunks out of his hair and ripping grooves down the side of his face.

I wonder if Henderson was worried that I might recognize them from somewhere. Or if it was just his instinct for perfect security at all times.

Could be the latter. Could be the former.

The only way to find out is to break into the farmhouse, but I seriously doubt my ability to do that and exit alive.

If I had Lev here, and enough weapons, we might chance it, but I don’t have Lev, I don’t have a weapon and I’ve no idea about the layout of the farm and farmhouse.

I notice that Geoff or Allan are always lingering at the top of the stairs, in easy view of the barn door, which is always locked and is released only by a six-digit code entered in a keypad to the side. Both men are always armed. Both trim enough too. Short-haired, alert, plenty of muscle. Military types, by the look of them, and comfortable with those handguns. The shutters over the big barn windows are bolted and padlocked.

I can forget about trying to get out of the farmhouse alive. Truth is, I probably wouldn’t be able to get out of the barn.

The first day seems long, but we find a rhythm.

Quintrell and I are essential in terms of determining exactly what the software system needs to deliver, but we add nothing of value to the business of figuring out how to make it do so. Increasingly, therefore, after that long first day, we end up spending time in our bedrooms or in the common room, available to be called on as required. Neither of us watch TV all that much. We ask Geoff if he can get books or magazines for us. He can’t, but Henderson comes over from the farmhouse with a stack of board games, and Quintrell and I find ourselves playing an endless game of Monopoly. Whenever one of us has too much money, we give it back to the bank or to the other. Whenever the board is getting too built up, we have a property clearance session, and tear down houses and hotels, foreclose on railways and utilities, strip the board back to something like its original nakedness.

I go to jail six times on my first day. After that I lose count.

Other people – Terry, Wyatt, Geoff, Henderson, and not Ram, but each of his colleagues – end up joining us as guests from time to time. I’m the boot. Quintrell is the racing car. Quintrell is moderately competitive. The Indians are all keen to amass huge fortunes, Terry too. Wyatt is too snobby to play for long. Geoff is too busy nursing his Glock to pay much attention and ends up giving money away and playing badly. Allan takes the game seriously. He’s sporting one of those close-trimmed beards that circles his mouth only, and he rubs his chin as he worries whether it would be prudent to invest in a third house on Regent Street.

I try quite hard, I really do, but somehow always mismanage things and am always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Terry, who does well, gives me those orange and pink £100 and £500 notes to tide me over. He enjoys the munificence.

When I get bored, I pace around, up and down, side to side.

My arms get better, but my neck still aches.

And when I’m not being a beautiful lady expert, or playing Monopoly, or pacing around, or eating sandwiches or soup with the others in the main room upstairs, I lie on the bed in my room, reading my speech therapy books. When Henderson asks me how I’m getting on, I make him put his fingers on his larynx and tell him about phonation. I say ‘bilabial plosive’, and it almost sounds as if I know what I’m talking about.

After lunch on day five, a Sunday, Ram calls our group together and goes through a one hundred and twenty point checklist of items. I realize, to my surprise, that we’ve covered them all. There are still further matters – issues of technical design, nothing to do with Quintrell or myself – to be covered, but they don’t need an accountant or a payroll clerk. Terry, discussing the matter with Ram, says to Henderson, ‘No, Vic, we don’t need them any more. I think we’re done.’

Henderson looks at us, smiles, says, ‘Time to go home.’

I put my stuff in a plastic bin liner that Geoff finds for me. Quintrell emerges from her room, neat as ever, towing her small suitcase, airport-style, behind her.

We go upstairs. Say goodbye to people. To Ram and his cohorts, to Terry and Wyatt. To Allan and Geoff. To those people from the ‘distribution team’ that we’ve got to know a bit in the course of our stay.

Henderson says, ‘OK, Fiona, please.’ A sentence which doesn’t mean anything at all, except that he holds out eye-mask and hood, and in the moment when I see them in his hands, I experience a terror as clean and pure as any feeling I’ve ever known. I don’t know if I say anything. I know I reach out my hand: this lady expert is going to cooperate with her gaoler and her seducer until her final breath. But my body has a reaction that simply bypasses my mind. Bypasses any sense of control, or will, or any number of secret identities.

I take the eye-mask, but I am trembling too much to pull it over my eyes.

We don’t need them any more. I think we’re done.

That could mean, ‘Thank you for a fine job of work, now enjoy a well-earned rest.’ Or it could mean, ‘Kill the bitches.’ Terry’s eyes didn’t flicker as he said what he said, but Henderson’s eyes probably didn’t flicker as he hacked Kureishi’s hands off.

I tremble so much that it takes Henderson’s fierce grip to keep me from falling.

He says, with that terrifying, controlled patience of his, ‘We’re taking you home. Nothing is going to happen to you. It’s a routine security precaution.’

He puts the eye-mask on. His hands are gentle, but the compulsion is total.

‘Head forward, please.’

I lean forward. I can feel my hair sliding either side of my neck. Baring it.

Will it be bullet or billhook? The strangler’s rope or the hangman’s noose?

I am still trembling.

The hood slides over my head. I keep my head bent as the cord is tied. Henderson keeps the cord fairly loose, but I can still feel its pressure on my throat as he pulls it tight.

The eye-mask alone is enough to block all light, but it’s not secure. The hood is doesn’t block as much light, but prevents me from tampering with the eye-mask.

‘There. You can put your head up.’

I straighten.

I am a beautiful lady expert in a black executioner’s hood. My breaths are billows that completely fill this little space. Each time I inhale, folds of black cotton press like moth wings on my mouth.

I hear Henderson pick up my bin liner of stuff. He takes me and it to the car. My legs feel so weak, I feel at risk of falling and Henderson’s hand is a crutch as much as a guide.

As he slots me into my seat, I murmur, ‘Sorry, Vic.’

He says, ‘That’s OK. You’re doing fine.’

I nod.

I don’t disbelieve him, but my body has its own logic. I am still trembling.

Henderson puts my seat belt on. Reaching across me to clip me in. I can feel the weight of his body as he leans across me. I lean my hood forward until I can feel the fabric crumple against the crook of his neck. The hump of his shoulder under my lips.

‘You’re not making this easier,’ he says mildly, as he tries to buckle me in.

I lean in to him fully. Rest against him. Somewhere beside us in the car, there is a swirl of dust and an eddy of oven-hot air.

He allows this to continue a moment or two, then pushes me back against my seat. Buckles me in.

‘What music do you want?’

‘Please, Vic, no headphones. Please.’

After a moment, ‘OK.’

He goes to get Quintrell. She stumbles as she gets in beside me. Henderson talks her through it.

I hadn’t realized it on the way here, but she’s blindfolded too. Not hooded necessarily – she might be trusted enough by now not to remove an eye-mask – but she has no more idea of where we are than I have. I’m guessing Ram and the others are in the same position. Perhaps it’s only the members of the elite ‘security strand’ who are privileged with this knowledge.

Henderson closes the door on Quintrell. My door is still open. He comes round to close it, but as he does so, I slip the catch on my seat belt. ‘Whoops.’

Henderson reaches in to do me up again, then changes his mind. Takes my head in his hands and kisses me hard, through the cotton, on my lips. I kiss back. Hard. Pull his head against mine, my nails against his scalp. He has one hand on my left breast, the other on my neck.

The cotton round my mouth is soaking wet. My kisses from the inside meeting his from the outside.

Quintrell says, ‘We’re OK, are we?’

Henderson, pulling away, says, ‘Yes.’ He’s panting slightly. I’m panting hard.

He strokes my breast, leans down to kiss it, bites gently, then buckles me in again.

I’m ridiculously aroused. Still frightened too. But it’s hard to tell. I think there’s a point at which the two feelings merge. It’s the sort of thing I’d normally ask someone, but I can tell that wouldn’t be clever. Instead, I touch the wet cloth against my upper lip and let my breathing slowly calm.

We drive off.

Henderson puts the radio on fairly loud for the first twenty minutes. Listening hard in the gaps and silences, I can’t hear anything unusual. I guess the music and headphones on the way here were simply a tool to disorient me even further. Perhaps also guard against any conversational indiscretions between Quintrell and Henderson. After twenty minutes, Henderson asks if we want more music or silence. Quintrell and I both opt for silence.

I’m constantly impressed by the depth of security precautions these guys take. Nothing is too much trouble. No risk too small to eliminate.

I wonder at my behaviour with Henderson.

I am attracted to him. Violently so. I wasn’t the first time I met him, but these things can creep up on you. They do on me, anyway.

Sexual attraction isn’t love, of course. Henderson is a murderer and a thief, who belongs in jail. But it’s disconcerting to find myself almost uncontrollably in lust with this man, when I find it hard even to imagine my feelings for Buzz.

My darling Buzz seems of a different world. In this one, he’s as real as a painted soldier. A toy.

And even as I press the cloth of my hood against my lip, breathe this cottony air still humid with those kisses, I realize that I have to see Buzz soon. Spend a weekend with him. Find those feelings I used to have. Not just those sweet high notes of love and respect, but the deep slow bass of the bedroom.

Brattenbury will worry about the operational implications, but I don’t want to be like the DCI who oversaw my undercover training course. Fifty-four and trying to rebuild the ruins of a family. If Brattenbury wants his raggedy wondergirl to go on working for him, he’ll have to compromise.

Meantime, as the car rolls on towards wherever Henderson is taking us, I try to think of myself in a wedding dress. Imagine the different bits of the ceremony. Myself, at the back of the church. Head in a cloud of white veil, a frill of bridesmaids behind. Stone columns and an altar window. The organ. Buzz willing me towards him. A press of gazes.

I try to imagine this. Try to make it real.

I pick threads from the car seat with my fingernail. Slip my shoe off and rub my stockinged foot into the tiny nylon curls of the floor carpet.

The car travels on, either to Cardiff or to death.