38.

Sleep and eventually wake.

Light glows from the ceiling. A prison dawn.

Quintrell doesn’t look like she’s slept much. She’s propped against the wall. Blanket doubled up over her legs. She’s staring at me. Her skin looks blue.

I don’t have my watch – it was removed at processing – but Quintrell has hers. I ask her the time.

‘Coming up to five o’clock.’

‘Thanks.’

I rinse my mouth in the little metal basin. Drink a bit.

My headache comes back and I want aspirin. Could ask for some, in fact – the custody staff would bring them – but I don’t want the intrusion.

Sit back down on my bed, look at Quintrell.

She says, ‘You should report them.’ She means the bruising on my face.

‘That’d work well.’

Quintrell trusts my legend completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

‘Thanks.’

She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks.’

Silence fills the cell.

Silence, and that eerie light which seems unconnected to any sun.

‘Is this your first time? You know: in prison.’

I say, ‘This isn’t prison. Prison’s worse.’ Then after a bit, I add, ‘There was stuff in Manchester. I’ve never been in for long.’

‘The policewoman yesterday told me that I could get ten years.’ She starts to cry again.

I watch her with interest. Envy, actually. I’ve only cried once in my adult life. I want to ask her the secret. What interior handbrake has to be released.

‘There was one guy, Somebody Scragg, who got seventeen years. For fraud. They showed me the reports.’

I say, ‘They showed them to me too. I don’t think we’ll get seventeen years.’

More crying.

Light strengthens in the ceiling. Down the hall, we hear a prisoner – mentally ill, almost certainly – shout and bang in his cell. Down the corridor, a movement of men.

‘I’ve got a daughter, you know.’

‘Have you?’

That’s news to me. No glimpse of it in Quintrell’s life so far. Nothing on the Tinker records. Brattenbury didn’t know it. Jackson didn’t. Jane Alexander didn’t know it when she was interviewing.

‘I was very young when I had her. Seventeen. When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t coping so well with things and gave her up for adoption. She’s eighteen now. We were just starting to get to know each other again.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Julia.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘She’s an art student. Lives in Bristol. We were beginning to do OK.’

‘She can visit you. It doesn’t have to end.’

‘She won’t visit.’

I let time go by. We’ve got plenty of time. I was arrested just after eleven. Quintrell would have been taken about the same time. The law permits us to be held for twenty-four hours without charge, thirty-six hours with the authority of a superintendent – something that Jackson can easily obtain – and ninety-six hours if a magistrate agrees. A magistrate probably would agree, given the circumstances, but it would be easier just to charge us. For a serious offence, like ours, and with murder and abduction in the background, we’ll almost certainly be remanded into pre-trial custody.

Fear, exhaustion and time: interrogation’s holy trinity.

I say, ‘Anna, how did you get into all this? Why did you get started?’

And she tells me.

Almost without further prompting. Without thought for where she is or who could be listening. It’s a beautiful illustration of the interrogator’s oldest maxim: that people want to confess. An urge as deep as breathing. The beautiful relief of sharing secrets.

As she tells it, Henderson approached her eighteen months ago with some queries about payroll. That must have been when Henderson discovered what Kureishi was up to. The point at which a little local fraud started to go big time.

‘I mean, I’m a trained accountant. I’m a professional. Vic’s just a thug. He knew nothing at all. Didn’t know the basics. He didn’t even understand the potential. It took me to explain it. I mean, really, that’s the silly thing. The whole thing was my idea. They just took it from me. They treated me … treated me like …’

She isn’t able to finish that sentence, because what she means is ‘they treated me like you’. Quintrell still sees herself as officer class. I’m several rungs below that. Servant class. A skivvy. Her confessional impulse now is given extra urgency by her bitterness at Henderson’s treatment of her.

I neither challenge nor support her. Just let her talk and let the hidden microphones record her song.

‘Terry – that’s not his real name. His real name is Ian Shoesmith. He ran some kind of IT start-up thing in London. Enterprise software. Got loads of money from investors and screwed them over. I think they looked at prosecuting him, but there wasn’t enough evidence. But he was shafted anyway. Not a fit and proper person and all that. Couldn’t be a company director again, and no one was going to employ him. So when Henderson took my idea, and it was totally my idea, to him, he took it up. The idea, back then, was that Terry would do the IT stuff. I’d be in charge of designing what the system had to do. James Wyatt was brought in because they thought they needed an accountant. But really! What did he ever add? You knew more.’

She’s wrong about Wyatt, as it happens. His real expertise was with the offshore plumbing. The network of accounts in Panama, Belize, the Virgin Islands. I don’t say so though. Just let her talk.

And talk she does, in sour, extensive detail. She seems affronted that a bunch of gangsters stole her intellectual property. Like she was expecting them to give her share options and a seat on the board.

I ask if Henderson is in charge.

‘No.’ Her no is scathing. ‘There’s some rich guy behind it all. He’s got legitimate money, I think, but Vic says he just invests in whatever promises a return. This looks good, so it gets the investment. Vic says they’ve spent four million already. Obviously got some of that back from’ – she waves her hand at me dismissively – ‘your stuff. But still. Four million.’

Your stuff: she means the payroll frauds that I and the other moles enacted.

‘That barn. The place we were taken to. Is that where the rich guy lives?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve always been blindfolded. I’ve never left the barn. Nor has anyone else. Ram told me they came in the back of a van without windows.’

I say, ‘That guy who had his hands chopped off. Did you know about that?’

She says, dismissively, ‘He was stupid. I mean, none of us wanted to do it, but he was talking. He was dangerous. If we hadn’t done it, he could have messed the whole thing up.’

That sounds like conspiracy to murder to me. It’ll sound that way to a court too. Quintrell doesn’t yet know it, but she’s just upped her maximum sentence from a dozen years or so to life imprisonment. She can hang her pretty blue summer dress up somewhere safe. She won’t be needing it for a while.

Shoesmith probably doesn’t wear summer dresses, but he’s fucked too. Him, Wyatt, Quintrell, Henderson. We have enough on them now to secure convictions for fraud at a minimum, conspiracy to murder at a maximum. If our colleagues in India come through for us, then Ramesh and his buddies are screwed as well. The UK has a decent extradition treaty with India. And we’ve a decent chance of getting the identifications we need.

We eat breakfast at six thirty. Break open the plastic-wrapped packs we were handed last night. Cereal. Two slices of bread. Jam. Margarine. I eat my cereal, leave the rest.

Quintrell talks about herself until eight thirty. She asks nothing about me. At eighty thirty, I pee and wash my hands.

The act interrupts her self-absorption.

‘You, you’ll be all right,’ she tells me. ‘I mean …’ She waves a hand. ‘You’re used to it.’

I don’t reply. A few minutes later, she’s taken off for interviewing and she’ll learn just how stupid she’s been.

I’m alone in an empty room. Invisible microphones close on silence.