I’ve seen him twice since Florida. I had one day with him in January, a day which we treated the way a long-term prisoner in a US state penitentiary might treat his once-annual conjugal visit. My February visit was slightly less fevered, but still steamy.
Because I’m not yet ‘in play’ as Brattenbury puts it, I’m allowed to see Buzz in his own flat. From now on, though, it’ll all be off-site locations which SOCA will arrange. When I see Buzz, he gives me the engagement ring and I wear it with joy. Take it off, sadly, when I leave.
We say lots of nice things to each other, of course. Keep those Floridian promises alive and warm in these Welsh winter damps. But I realize that I treasure that diamond glitter not least because it’s an emblem of all I thought I’d never have. To have recovered from my illness enough that a sane man could want to marry me. To have recovered enough that I could even think to marry.
Mirabile dictu
.
I can’t stop looking at the ring when I’m wearing it. Buzz sees me looking and is fit to burst with pride and love.
Fiona Grey, meanwhile, little by little improves her life. She puts money aside for her housing loan. Buys a plate, a bowl, a mug, a saucepan. She doesn’t buy cutlery, because she’s stolen plenty from the canteen at work. She buys a tiny second-hand TV, but no license.
We also buy a second-hand laptop. We can’t access the internet at home – Fiona Grey fails every credit check, so no one will give her a contract – but we can sometimes get to the library before it closes. There we look at our emigration options. New Zealand and Australia look difficult. Canada looks hopeful. The United States looks possible, but expensive. We download some forms, make enquiries. Set up a Post Office savings account as Fiona Grey.
But it’s not all personal improvement. There’s a seedy-looking café in the studenty bit of Cathays which does vegan and organic food. I buy two cannabis plants from the hippy who serves coffee there. We celebrate our deal by smoking a joint out by the dustbins at the back. It’s my first smoke since I arrived back in Cardiff.
Brattenbury, I see weekly. He reviews everything I do in meticulous detail. When I tell him I put my name down for an early morning cleaning shift, he pounces on it. ‘Why? Why do that? Why add the pressure?’
‘Cover, sir. It’s what Fiona Grey would do.’
‘You can shape who she is. You don’t have to give yourself one and a half jobs, on top of the one you do for us.’
I shrug. ‘That’s what any SIO would say to any undercover officer. So no undercover officer would take the cleaning job. So it’s a perfect job to take, if I get the chance.’
Brattenbury disapproves, but since I don’t actually have an offer of cleaning work, he lets it go.
Jackson, too, I see on and off. He has appointed himself my chief welfare officer. He’s like a possessive dad who can’t quite let his daughter live her own life at university. He asks me if I’m eating enough. If it’s OK with Buzz and with my family.
I laugh at him and don’t call him sir.
With Brattenbury, things are more practical. He tells me stuff, drills me in stuff. The use of recording devices. The way the plan is shaping up.
‘Audio and video surveillance are in place. Ditto network access. We don’t know if Tinker have installed recording equipment, but we have to assume they do. You should assume your PC is compromised as well.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And meantime, we’ve “infiltrated” Roy Williams into Fielding Insurance.’ Brattenbury’s fingers walk inverted commas through the empty air. ‘I think he’ll do perfectly.’
‘He’s a natural payroll type,’ I murmur. ‘Duck to water.’
‘Yes.’ Brattenbury laughs. ‘I’ve seldom seen an officer less happy in his role. But we’ve done a proper job with him, actually. Wired him up. Surveilled his flat and his workplace. The whole works. We want it to appear as though we’re taking the kind of countermeasures that the Tinker gang would expect us to take. We don’t want to look suspiciously sloppy.’
‘No, sir.’
He scrutinizes me. ‘You’ve got your computer?’
‘Yes, sir. And I’ve been getting online when I can.’
‘Good. And your savings account?’
‘Done.’
‘Your horticultural projects?’
‘Thriving.’
‘Good.’ He explores my face with his eyes. I don’t know what he finds there. Fiona Grey tends to look away from authority, so my eyes stay close to the floor. My hands are in my lap. I don’t think that’s how I sit normally, but I can’t remember how I was before. This is me now.
‘We’ll make our move soon. Are you ready? Or ready enough?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘OK. Stay safe.’
18.
Stay safe. I’ve been in my post four weeks and two days, when uniformed officers enter our offices and arrest one of my co-workers, the department’s deputy manager, Ellen Keith.
The charge is fraud. Keith has, apparently, been using her managerial privileges to falsify her own payroll. Excessive overtime. Unsubstantiated expense claims. Insufficient deductions for tax. A classic example of the successful crook getting too greedy and overreaching themselves.
At my next meeting with Brattenbury, he tells me they were lucky. ‘She wasn’t just stealing on behalf of Tinker. She started stealing on behalf of herself. Doing it quite incompetently too. So it was a nice, easy arrest. We didn’t have to disturb the Tinker operation. From the gang’s point of view, they’ve just watched us take down a rogue part of their operation. In some ways, they’ll be relieved to have lost her.’
‘Won’t Tinker be worried that she might spill the beans?’
‘Maybe, but I severely doubt she has any beans to spill. If you were Tinker, you’d tell her as little as possible and use false names and neutral meeting points.’
He shrugs. Nothing is risk free. Not in his world, not in mine. Brattenbury has lost some of his tan, but that look of health continues to illuminate the office. I wonder how I come across. Not like that, I think.
When he resumes he says, ‘From Western Vale alone, they are currently stealing £73,000 a month, via twenty-nine different fraudulent payroll accounts. They aren’t going to risk losing that.’
‘No, sir.’
‘They’ll be looking to replace Keith. They’ll make their checks – we expect them to be thorough – then come after their chosen replacement.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Brattenbury, I think, is expecting me to a bit more gung-ho. A bit more let’s-get-these-bastards, guv, but that’s not quite my style, or not Fiona Grey’s anyway. He seems dissatisfied by my lack of response and keep prodding away at it restlessly. I say ‘yes, sir’ when I need to and otherwise don’t say much.
After half an hour, I say, ‘Is that all you needed, sir?’ and he says, ‘Yes.’
At work, meanwhile, we talk about Keith’s fall from grace in shocked whispers. She’d been a bright, vivacious, even raucous presence, with carmine nails and suits in orange, red and bottle green. Those things are now being reinterpreted as signs of peeping criminality. We get visits and lectures from compliance officers, from audit, from the executive suite.
Me, I just do what I do. Live frugally. Save what I can. Wear my rubbish clothes from Matalan. Work hard.
I do decide to cut my hair and trim it myself in my little sink. It’s not a very good job, maybe, but good enough. The hair got a bit shorter, which is what I was aiming at.
And one evening when I drop in at the hostel for a warm meal and a bit of social life, Abs looks up from some paperwork and says, ‘Oh, Fi, there was a man here yesterday, asking after you. A friend of yours.’
‘Oh?’
‘A Vic somebody?’
I shrug. I don’t know a Vic. Abs says, ‘We don’t give out personal information. He doesn’t have your address or anything like that.’
I say good, and give her a pound for an evening meal.
And then one night, about two weeks after Keith’s departure, I come home from a visit to the library to find my door unlocked and a man sitting in my giant velour armchair. Mid-thirties, give or take. Thinning on top. Clean shaven. Grey suit, pale blue shirt. The man from Brattenbury’s photo.
I stand in my doorway, staring.
I probably look frightened. Maybe I am frightened. I’m not sure.
He says, ‘Sorry, come in. I mean, this is your room, isn’t it?’
I half close the door. Drop my bag. Sit on the bed.
‘Nice place.’
I don’t say anything to that. It
isn’t
a nice place. There’s nothing nice about it. I just happen to like it.
‘I’m Vic. Victor. But everyone calls me Vic.’
‘How did you get in?’
‘I picked the lock.’ He shows me his lock picks. I have a set just like it, but not here. ‘I’m not here to hurt you. Sorry, I should have said that straight out.’
‘You a friend of Rick’s?’
‘Rick? I don’t know a Rick. No. Nothing to do with me.’
Rick: the name of my abusive, if theoretical, ex-boyfriend.
‘You from Manchester?’
‘No, love. You don’t know me. I’ve got nothing to do with any of whatever that is. I’m here because I want to help out. Honestly. Look, shall I put the kettle on?
Is
there a kettle?’
There’s only a saucepan and one mug, but I let him make me peppermint tea. There’s nothing for him to drink out of and no tea or coffee, so he has to make do. He puts my mug down on the little bedside table. I’m still sitting on the bed, coat still on.
‘I didn’t know you were a gardener, Fiona,’ he says, gesturing towards the cupboard.
I keep my cannabis plants in the cupboard, with a low-power heat lamp to keep them happy. I don’t say anything. Not about the fact that he’s looked in the cupboard, nor about the fact he knows my name.
I take the tea. I want to pull my knees up towards my chin, but I’m wearing a skirt and can’t do that easily, not with him here.
‘You work at Western Vale, right? New job.’
I don’t say anything.
‘Look, there’s something you could do for me. I’d pay you.’
I shake my head.
‘Easily done. Five minutes, literally. I’d pay a grand. Cash.’
My head is still shaking. ‘No. I’d like you to leave, please. I don’t want …’ Fiona Grey isn’t very assertive and I can’t look at this man. I look at the side of the armchair and talk to the floor.
‘Thing is, if I happened to call Western Vale and say I think they ought to get you to do a drugs test, you might not have a job afterwards. Then what? Back to the cleaning? Back home to Manchester? I don’t think you’d make it to Canada or Australia or wherever you wanted to go next.’
I do draw my knees up now. Wrap my arms around my calves. I think I rock. It feels something like that. If I say anything, I probably say, ‘Please.’
Vic, I think, studies me for a while. I’m not sure. I’m not looking.
Then I hear him stand up and he says, ‘Look, this is all a bit fast for you, isn’t it? Tell you what, just think it over. Don’t do anything stupid. I won’t do anything. And maybe we’ll go out tomorrow for a drink, somewhere nice, and we’ll just talk it over.’
I don’t say anything. Just hug my legs.
‘If I come round tomorrow, maybe. Shall we say six?’
Fiona finds it hard to say much, but she does manage to get out the words, ‘Don’t come here.’ She doesn’t get them out very loudly, though, and Vic says, ‘What?’ before realizing. Then he says, ‘OK, let’s meet somewhere. You choose. What sort of place? A wine bar maybe? A pub?’
I’m not a very good conversationalist, so I let these questions go.
Vic gives me space to answer, then says, ‘OK, how about The Grape and The Grain, half past six. Do you know where that is?’
I do. It’s a wannabe upmarket wine bar, a ten- or fifteen-minute walk into town from here. I nod, just enough for Vic to see the nod.
‘Half past six tomorrow then,’ he says.
That’s not really a confirmation of an arrangement, not on his lips. It’s more like a reiteration of a threat. Be there, or …
But I nod.
I’ll be there.
Vic stands at the door and checks the room. I feel his gaze on me, on my bed, my chair, my few possessions. It’s as though he’s taking an inventory and I’m his Item One.
When he goes, I lock the door after him. Then sit on the bed again. Back against the wall, knees under my chin, arms round my legs. The full teenage angst pose, with a little bit of rocking thrown in, I think.
I’m not faking it, or not really.
Yes, I’m aware that Henderson is probably bugging my room. Watching my next moves. But Fiona Grey isn’t pretending to be a cleaner. She is a cleaner. A cleaner with aspirations for a higher, brighter, easier life that’s all of a sudden looking lower, dirtier and harder than she’d ever wanted.
I stay hugging my legs until I get cold. Then wrap the duvet round me and hug some more. Then, much later, roll a joint, a big one, and smoke out of the window. When I look at my watch, it’s one in the morning and I haven’t eaten anything since lunch. But I’m not hungry. I do my teeth in the sink. Strip down to my underwear. Go to bed.
I lie there, two people at once. Fiona Grey is thinking about tomorrow. She
is
scared, I can feel it. Her hopeless past about to swallow her once-hopeful future.
Fiona Griffiths is a more elusive quantity. She ought to be happy with the way things are going, but if she is, I can’t feel it.
Was Vic there when Kureishi was killed? Was he the man who wielded the hatchet? Maybe. It hardly matters. Certainly not morally, but not legally speaking either. The doctrine of common purpose means you don’t have to wield the hatchet to count as a murderer.
Fiona Griffiths lies in bed, staring up at her dark ceiling, listening to the traffic. Different tunes. Cars leaving the slip road make one kind of sound, as they brake for the lights. But that’s the descant to the main road’s bass. The sound I like the best is the foot-to-the-floor sound of vehicles as they climb the A470 flyover. Metal angels ascending to a tarmac heaven.
This Fiona wonders what she’s got herself into. Whether she’ll ever get herself out. She wonders if Brattenbury has been watching all this. If Henderson is.
She’s hoping yes.
19
The Grape and The Grain. Ten to seven.