46.

I say yes, of course. Negotiate Henderson from twenty K to fifty. Payable into a bank account on Grand Cayman. My signature. My security questions. My passwords. I say that I won’t do the three weeks in London until the Kiwi visa has been approved.

Henderson says yes to all that. Finds it funny, really, that I’ve learned security paranoia from him. I don’t think the fifty K was even close to being a deal-breaker. I could probably have pushed for more.

I also demand to know exactly what my schedule is meant to be.

‘It always gets more, what you want,’ I point out. ‘This needs to be the last time it goes up.’

‘We pay you more too.’

‘It’s never been about money. You know that.’

‘OK.’ Henderson gets out his phone. Checks the diary pages on it. Gives me my dates for Birmingham. Two weeks there. Three weeks in London.

‘Those three weeks in London. You go live after that?’

‘Yes. In five weeks’ time.’

‘OK.’

‘And we’ll want you for a weekend, as well please.’

‘Are you propositioning me?’

He smiles at that, but it’s not much of a smile. His mind is on business, not sex.

‘The farmhouse. Our final round of testing. It’ll be right after Birmingham.’ He gives me the dates. September 22 and 23. A year, pretty much, since I first sat in that furniture superstore with Huw Bowen smelling Kevin-from-Swindon’s body odor. Calculating forwards, it looks like Tinker is planning to launch its fake software in mid-October. We’re five weeks from the biggest theft in history. I hope Brattenbury is listening. Hope he knows I’ve just ticked off the third of the three objectives he gave me.

‘I won’t wear the hood again,’ I say. ‘The eye-mask thing was OK.’

A small hesitation but, ‘All right. As you wish.’

‘And it’ll be an extra ten K.’

‘Ten thousand pounds? For a weekend?’

‘No. Ten thousand pounds for seventeen years in jail. That’s five hundred quid a year, a bit more than one pound a day.’

Henderson looks at me. He’s amused more than anything. He has dark hairs peeping from the join in his white shirt and I can see the two colors of blue in his eyes. Rain clouds flecked with the tropics. Cobalt shimmering on a dark Welsh sea.

They don’t move me now. Not really. Not me, not Fiona Grey, not Jessica. We catch killers. We don’t sleep with them.

But Henderson doesn’t know that. He says yes to my ten grand. Pours wine.

I don’t sleep with killers, I catch them, but sometimes the two rivers run close. And after dinner, after the light had died on the Bay, after the amuse-bouches and the complimentary champagne and the artisanal breads and the seven-course tasting menu and the coffees and the petits fours, I say, ‘Do you have a room?’ Henderson doesn’t reply directly. Just calls a waiter over. Has the whole thing arranged without leaving table.

He finishes his coffee, I play with my petit four, then we go up. Side by side in the elevator, hardly talking.

He let us into the room. Not a room, even. A suite. Huge glass windows over the sea. No curtains, not meaningfully, because aside from the big ships heading up or down the estuary, there’s no one there to gaze at us. There are a couple of side lamps switched on by the bed. Some wall lamps in the sitting room. Henderson stands back, watching to see what I want. Ready to do whatever it is. More lights, less. Music. Champagne.

But I don’t want any of that. I like the deadness of the light. The huge grey bay waiting like a boneyard beyond the glass.

I stand at the foot of the bed and shrug slightly.

I’m wearing a dress that I chose, not Jessica. A little black number. Not too tarty. Not too glam. Just a dress.

Date-wear. The sort of dress that might say sex, but doesn’t have to.

Henderson comes up close. Kisses me on the lips. A little bite as he finishes.

He’s low on the foreplay, though. I think he figures that an afternoon and evening in a luxury spa, plus sixty grand for five weeks’ work, has pretty much covered him on the foreplay front. If he isn’t pushier now, I think that’s only because he knows Miss Grey can be a bit of a wildcat.

I reach behind my shoulder blades. Find the zip and release it. I suddenly feel very naked. Stop the dress falling beyond my waist, then realize that’s stupid and let it drop to the floor. Put my hands to Henderson’s jacket and shirt. Encourage him to join me in this nakedness.

He does.

There’s a brief moment when we’re both in our underwear. Black M&S stuff in my case. I think the same in his.

There’s something missing, however, and I think even Henderson feels it. When we were kissing through the hood, or even earlier when he came to my room in the barn with the bags of clothes from Gap, we both felt a kind of passion that was as hungry, at least in my case, as anything I’ve ever known.

It’s not like that now. The negotiations over money, the sense of mounting risk, the abduction of Roy Williams and the death of Tania Lewis, those things have all killed what there once was.

A darkened ocean beats time beyond the windows and I sit on the bed. Say, ‘Was it you who killed Tania Lewis?’

He looks at me sharply, but says, ‘No.’

‘Were you there?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did you …? She was really hurt.’

‘We didn’t hurt her much beforehand. She died from a gunshot. Most of what happened to her happened after that.’

‘But you helped. You helped do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about the guy in that video?’

‘Yes. That was me. The man concerned had become significantly dangerous. Stole money, started talking. And he wasn’t a waitress. He did know the score.’

‘What is it like? Killing someone.’

‘You stabbed someone once.’

‘That was different.’

‘I have my job, Fi. I’m tasked to keep things secure and I do. That’s it, really. I don’t have big feelings about it.’

My dress lies in a pool of black viscose at my feet. I pick at it. Finding the shoulder straps. Lifting it, until an unfilled torso rises from the pool. A dark shape, waiting for me to enter it.

Vic’s shirt lies on the floor next to my dress. A dark blue number, with a bit of shine. He is well-muscled. The kind of body you only get from the gym. Taut biceps curling into well-developed deltoids. A cloud of dark hair wanders across his chest. Bronze light reflects from his skin.

I rub my fingers into his chest. Look into the two colors of his eyes.

It doesn’t move me any more. The chest, the eyes, anything.

‘I don’t think I can do this, Vic. I’m sorry. Not now. Not while everything is still …’

He doesn’t answer directly. His mouth is a line of grimness, but his eyes are softer. Eventually he says, ‘It’s OK. It was probably a bad idea.’

‘My bad idea. I’ll pay for the room.’

‘No. Don’t worry about it.’

He lifts my ankle. I’m still wearing my tights and they bulge over the ankle bracelet. I wriggle out of the tights. He inserts a cable into the output socket, enters a code via a handset, and wipes the past two hours’ recording. Checks it twice to make sure it’s gone. As he does all that, I pull my dress back on, my tights. Apologize again.

The data is gone. I’m dressed. Henderson gets a cold beer from the minibar. Asks me if I want anything, but I don’t.

He grins over his beer at me. He only spoke as freely as he did just now, because this was his choice of hotel, because the room was booked last minute, because he knows that I have not been approached by the police nor, indeed, have I been anywhere except my own flat or the hotel itself since the plan to come here was concocted.

A raft of precautions. A row of green lights.

But even Henderson can fuck up, and he did just now.

I did have my afternoon at the spa. Got a massage, which was nice: I’ve never had one before. Also booked in for a seaweed wrap, because it sounded like the single stupidest thing on the spa’s long list of very stupid things. But I didn’t get to the wrap, because the woman on the massage table next to me was Susan Knowles. We smiled at each other, but barely spoke.

Then, after we’d each been rubbed and pounded, we moved through to the Jacuzzi. I sat on the edge, dangling my ankle in the foaming water. My ankle bracelet, with its oh-so-sensitive audio recording, listening to the noise of a million bubbles. A surge of water and the beat of a pump.

‘Hey, Susan, nice to see you.’

‘You too, blonde girl. Good thinking about the Jacuzzi.’

‘I wasn’t sure if anyone would get my fell-runner reference.’

‘Adrian knows that I run. But if it hadn’t been me, we’d have sent someone else.’

We chatted a bit. How’s Adrian. News from the case. Buzz sent his love. But mostly we were quickly down to business.

‘I want to get a confession tonight,’ I said. ‘Can you get the restaurant wired up?’

‘We’re on it already. The simplest thing is just to put recorders in the salt cellars. Something like that. We’ll do every table probably.’

‘And a room maybe? If we go upstairs afterwards.’ Susan raised her eyebrows, but I was quick to add, ‘I don’t think he would ever speak in a public place. Even if he felt sure it was secure. A bedroom, maybe. I’m not sure. It’s worth a try. I won’t go all the way.’

Susan looked hard at me and said, ‘You know, your man Brydon, ages ago, he came to us and said that if you had to do something – get intimate, whatever – in order to secure a conviction, then he’d understand. He just said you should never tell him. Never let him know.’

‘What did you say?’

‘It was Adrian he spoke to. Adrian just said that there was absolutely no question of you becoming intimate with anyone. That that wasn’t your role in the case.’

That sounds like Buzz to me. Like Brattenbury too. Both doing the right thing. The professional thing. But it would kill Buzz, I think. And ‘never tell him’ is all very well. But if I secured evidence essential to a prosecution, that evidence would have to be aired in court, no matter where I obtained it.

I don’t know what my face said, but Susan said, ‘He’s a good man, your one. Hang on to him.’

I nodded, dumbly. Thinking that for this long year Buzz must have had half a worry that I wasn’t just working undercover but working under the covers too. A Welsh Mata Hari.

‘Anyway. We’ll put a room aside for you. And record the hell out of it.’

‘Thank you.’

She looked at me and grinned. Gave me a hug.

‘We’d best keep this short,’ she said.

I nodded.

‘Not long now.’

Nod.

‘And make sure you get the bastard.’

By now, I expect, she knows I did.

When I leave the hotel that night, walking back to my flat, still feeling the touch of that almost-intimacy on my skin, I think of how much it has taken us all to get here. Hayley Morgan and her purposeless sacrifice. Saj Kureishi and his anguished astonishment. Nia Lewis, in her tangle of nettles and wire netting. But Buzz too. His honorable waiting. Dennis Jackson and his gruff, senior-officer kindness. Brattenbury’s professionalism, Susan’s intelligence.

I’ve got Anna Quintrell in jail. Henderson now on record as confessing to murder. Wyatt and Shoesmith in our crosshairs. Ramesh and his buddies too.

If we get them, we’re likely to find enough to get Geoff and Allan too. When we rip into the house searches, the forensics, the interrogations, we’re pretty much certain to get the leads we need. Geoff, Allan, plus some of the others involved in finance and distribution.

But that’s not enough. The Hendersons, the Wyatts, the Quintrells – they’re not enough. I don’t just want them: the salarymen and women of this particular crime. I want the person I’ve never heard mentioned. I want whoever it is that owns the farmhouse. I want whoever has four million pounds of seed capital to fund this venture. When Brattenbury and I have sketched Tinker’s hypothetical organization chart, we’ve always had a space that just says, The Boss – ???. And I want that man. In jail for fraud and murder. A life sentence. Some huge minimum tariff.

So far, we’ve not had the glimmer of a clue as to that person’s identity. We don’t, if we’re honest, even know that the person exists. But Henderson walked from his osteopath’s office into the building next door, presumably in order to see someone. You don’t do that – find a building with that odd connecting door arrangement, attend a long sequence of osteopathy appointments, then use that cover to skip next door for an hour before returning the same way – unless you are seeking to cover something up.

Something – but what? I don’t know, but for the first time I feel we have a tangible clue. I hope Brattenbury feels the same excitement. I guess he would, except that I think he was nudging me to lower my expectations. His letter said, We’re applying for surveillance warrants for that other building now. Fingers crossed on that.

Fingers crossed: a reminder of the legalities involved. Thus far, there’s been little difficulty in getting authority to surveille, bug and tap almost everything we’ve wanted. Our legal argument has been textbook in its straightforwardness. Roughly speaking: we know, or have a very strong and evidentially based suspicion, that this person (Henderson, Quintrell, Allan, Shoesmith, Wyatt) is involved in criminal fraud and conspiracy to murder. We want to bug their home/phone/mobile/whatever. Easy.

Amazingly enough, every interception warrant is personally authorized by the Home Secretary herself, and no sane Home Secretary would conceivably reject most of the applications we’ve made so far. But bugging an entire building full of perfectly innocent people in the hope of catching a single (and very occasional) non-innocent encounter that probably takes place somewhere in that building – well, you don’t have to be much of a civil libertarian to have anxieties about that approach to policing. I think Brattenbury expects a no.

So near, but yet so far.

I’ve made arrests before. Secured prosecutions, convictions, seen people put away for life. But I’ve never hit the big guys. The owner-managers of organized crime. The people who are so far above the dirty day-to-day stuff that they run their legitimate enterprises, send their kids to private schools, collect fatuous awards for entrepreneurship, make ostentatious donations to charity, collect trophy wives and pretty mistresses, and no one even thinks to ask if this or that well-connected businessman might actually be a major league asshole.

Am I bitter? I am. The last big case I worked on had a rich, successful guy as its primary target. A man who, at one stage, ordered me killed and who evaded our intended prosecution with such sweet ease that we might as well have tried to clap handcuffs on the ocean.

In my only big case before that, the same thing, except that the bastard rich guy in question had the good grace to die before my investigation even started.

I’d dearly love to break my duck. Dearly love to get Tinker’s Mr. Big behind bars. To nail him on a series of charges so long, so inescapable, that he’ll grow old and die behind prison bars. I’d like to watch as he finds his comb thicken with grey hairs, as he feels the first loosening of teeth in his gums, as he watches his face slowly break into a river delta of wrinkles, and to know that the only thought which beats in his head is, This is all remains to me now. This ten foot by six foot cell. This prison food, these clanging doors.

As I walk home under this northern sky, the stars above ask if I’m ready. If I mean business. If I’m going to get my man.

And I am, I tell them, I really am.