At the end of the day, I give Amina fifty pounds. ‘For rent,’ I say. She tells me I don’t have to, but keeps the money.
I call Mr. Conway at YCS and ask him if he has any work available. I say, ‘I don’t mind if I have to work some extra hours to start with.’ Meaning: it’s OK if I work four hours and he pays me for two. YCS isn’t particularly exploitative, but they all cut corners where they can. Conway takes my phone number and says he’ll see.
There are only two bedrooms in the flat – no beds, just mattresses on the floor – and Asad has a room all to himself. I’m happy to sleep in the living room, but Amina is perplexed and, I think, upset by my assumption. It’s clear she’s used to sleeping many to a bed and so when it comes to the evening, we just go upstairs together. My short, milky limbs lying next to her long, ebony ones. ‘We are sisters now,’ Amina announces and turns out the light.
I still see Kureishi when I close my eyes, but it’s better now that I’m not alone. I sleep badly, but it’s not awful.
The first morning, Amina goes out to work leaving Asad – ‘his name means lion’ – with a neighbor. I tidy the house and try to bring order to the kitchen.
That afternoon, Conway does call. Asks me in for work the next day. I don’t know if Brattenbury found a way to nudge that forward or if Conway really is that short of almost-reliable cleaners. I’m guessing a bit of both.
And, pretty soon, Amina and I find our rhythm.
We leave the house at just after three. Work from four to nine, cleaning offices for YCS. Then Amina leaves for a job at a local hotel which keeps her busy until early afternoon. I go straight back to the flat and retrieve the lion, Asad, from the neighbor. Then I keep him clean and entertained. Do what I can to clean in the kitchen. Get the house a bit tidier. All this, until Amina returns.
She usually criticizes my cooking, which I can understand, but is also strangely dismissive of my efforts to clean, although the place is already a million times cleaner than it was. I’ve already filled five black sacks with rubbish and have got through three packets of kitchen cleaning cloths and two bottles of cleaning fluid, all of which I bought with my own money. But Amina’s sourness doesn’t tip over into anything serious and before too long we’re friends again. Spend the afternoons watching TV, which Amina doesn’t understand very well, and singing Asad songs in Arabic and Somali which I don’t understand at all. Amina and I go to bed at eight. We don’t cuddle or touch particularly, but if we happen to wake up skin to skin, that doesn’t bother either of us. It’s a nice way to pass the night.
At the weekend, there’s some kind of gathering of the family or clan and Amina and I work like slaves cooking and tidying and getting things ready. The people who come are almost all men or older boys. I mostly stay in the kitchen and help with the dishes. When it’s obvious that Amina needs help to clear the living room, I ask her if I ought to wear a headscarf. She says no, but there is something dark in her face, so I go upstairs and borrow one of her scarves anyway. No alcohol is served, but the men all chew khat and have teeth ranging from dark-yellow to almost-black.
And that’s my life.
Amina says we are sisters, but when she returns home from work, and I greet her at the door, with a clean baby in my arms, a tidy kitchen, a hoovered floor, the laundry drying upstairs, and something bubbling on the stove, I feel like something more than that. A wife. A helpmeet. Once, and it was only once, I spilled something in the kitchen – meat, quite an expensive item in our budgets – and Amina, quick as a flash, slapped me across the face and cursed me in Somali. I apologized quickly and after a minute or two, Amina relented and started smiling again. ‘But you are a very clumsy woman. Your mother did not teach you.’
Teach you
: Amina’s limbs are longer and more beautiful than mine, but they bear scars which, she told me, came from her mother beating her with wire. I’m not sure, on the whole, that I’d like to be a Somali wife, sister or daughter. Not permanently, anyway.
On the fifth day, I have a long phone call with Brattenbury, from a payphone in Drayton Park. I say, ‘That Heathrow hotel. We’ve got CCTV of incoming guests?’
Brattenbury has to double-check, but says yes. He reminds me that day-users of the hotel don’t need to register.
‘But there were some Indian faces there, as I remember?’ Amina doesn’t have an internet connection and my iPad is still in Cardiff. But I’m pretty sure there were.
‘I think so.’
‘We know when Henderson and Quintrell arrived and left the hotel that day. Can you check those times against flights to and from Bangalore?’
‘Bangalore? Why Bangalore?’
I tell him.
He checks on his computer as I hold the line. ‘Well, bloody hell.’
He tells me that a flight came in from Bangalore that morning. The time would have been enough for someone to have come through immigration, showered in the business lounge, and come on to the hotel. The flight time back tallied reasonably well with Quintrell and Henderson’s departure too.
I say, ‘I think we need to check the passenger manifest. Also, can we get number plates for every car in the hotel car park that day?’
‘Yes. We’ll get onto that immediately.’
On the seventh day, I speak to Brattenbury again. He says, ‘That Heathrow hotel.’
‘Yes?’
‘OK, whoever books a conference room has to sign for a key. We got a handwriting specialist to check those signatures. No “Vic Henderson” on the list of course, but we’ve got one signature that tallies pretty well with samples of his handwriting we’ve taken from his house.’
‘OK, good.’
‘That particular conference room was originally booked for an hour after the Bangalore flight was due to land. As you say, Bangalore is basically India’s answer to Silicon Valley. It’s heaving with IT types. So your guess looked spot on.’
‘Yes?’
‘Wait, it gets better. Quintrell and Henderson
didn’t
arrive then, though. Hotel CCTV pictures has them arriving at the hotel
three
hours after the flight was due to come in. So your guess looked bad, except that …’
‘Don’t tell me—’
‘Yep. The flight was delayed. Some refueling problem in Bangalore. Two hours late arriving. Henderson and Quintrell just shifted their arrival time accordingly. Oh, and the meeting broke up just in time for the flight back home.’
‘Bingo!’
‘Yes, quite. And we can compare passenger manifests for the journey there and back. Both flights were fully booked but only sixteen passengers came for the day only. So our guy is one of those.’
‘Guy or
guys
. These boys don’t do things by halves.’
‘No. Look, I think we need to bring you in for a day. You should meet Susan Knowles, who’s leading the IT part of all this. You’ll like her.’
I say yes, that’s a good idea.
Later that day, I give Amina another fifty pounds of rent money. Forty pounds for food. She takes the cash and doesn’t tell me I don’t need to give it.
On the tenth day, I take a train into central London. Follow a route prescribed for me by Brattenbury. I’m walking up the Earl’s Court Road when a grey Mondeo draws up alongside me. Two men inside, windows wound down.
‘All right, love, we’re on your team,’ says one. ‘No one on you.’
The other says, ‘Adrian’s got a hotel room round the corner. Nice place too.’
He’s right. It’s one of those boutiquey hotels you see in the magazines. Designery and secluded. Ornate Victorian brickwork crowded with window-boxes, each one a fury of nasturtiums and scarlet marigolds.
Inside, Brattenbury takes me up to a suite. A small but lovely sitting room and, behind, an invisible bedroom. There’s a woman there: sleek, late thirties, red-headed, intelligent. She introduces herself as Susan Knowles. She’s from the part of SOCA that used to be the Hi-Tech Crime Unit, though she’s nobody’s idea of a geek.
She shakes my hand and says, ‘Adrian’s wondergirl. Nice to meet you at last.’
Adrian’s wondergirl doesn’t quite know how to answer that so, as he fusses with glasses and bottled water in the corner, I make meaningless small talk instead. She studies me carefully, as though I’m an unusual specimen, an object of gossip.
I let her scrutinize away. A butterfly preening under the lepidopterist’s lens.
As Brattenbury rejoins us, we turn straight to business. The first item for discussion is my portfolio of names. The twenty-nine where we know a fraud is currently active. The nineteen further names, where the individuals concerned are, in fact, regular employees of Western Vale, doing their regular work at a regular salary.
Brattenbury says, ‘Do you have any ideas about what those nineteen names might be all about?’
I tell them what I think’s going on.
Knowles says, ‘Yes, we think the same.’ She trails off and in the silence we feel the shadow of a larger crime, concealed within one that is already large enough, one that has already taken two lives.
‘It’s no wonder they killed Kureishi,’ I said. ‘When you think what they’re playing for.’
‘And it would explain why they’re quite so security-conscious,’ says Brattenbury.
‘Flying in IT consultants from Bangalore. That’s a completely new one in my experience,’ adds Knowles.
There’s a tiny silence in which we all try to ignore the fact that, if the stakes are as high as we think they are, the life of one little payroll clerk won’t figure much.
Instead, we do what all coppers do in a case that’s not making sufficient progress. We turn to detail. Knowles wants to know exactly what’s happening, payroll-wise, with those nineteen names. Anything odd as regards tax, or overtime, or any of the other matters that cross my desk.
I give, from memory, a very full description of what I’ve been doing.
At one point Knowles is worried that I’m inventing stuff to please her, and she says, ‘This is a lot of detail, Fiona. Are you sure you remember all this correctly?’
I say, ‘I can’t be certain, no, but I knew this would be important so I invented mnemonics to help me remember. Plus I used a spreadsheet to keep notes of what was happening as I went along, then closed the spreadsheet without saving it.’ I look at Brattenbury and say, ‘I assume …?’
He nods. He’s got a pad in front of him which, I now realize, he’s been consulting while I was speaking with Susan. ‘We reconstructed the spreadsheet from the log of your key strokes. Your spreadsheet didn’t cover everything you’ve just been discussing, but where I can check your memory against what you wrote in the spreadsheet …’ His gaze turns to Susan. ‘She’s better than ninety per cent accurate. Maybe even ninety-five.’
Susan gives me a smile, big, warm and genuine. One that starts in the eyes and stays there after the lips have finished their thing. There’s also, I note, a darted look between her and Brattenbury. His look, I think, says,
See what I mean?
And from that point on – I don’t know. I’ve never encountered anything like it. The pair of them start treating me like an adult. The way, I imagine, senior officers routinely deal with one another. Brattenbury and Knowles share information, suggest possible lines of inquiry, ask for my opinion. At one point, I complain that my police-coding restricts my ability to see some of SOCA’s Tinker files. Knowles just nods and, off a look from Brattenbury, says, ‘I’ll get that fixed.’
And, I think, I become a better officer. Less obstreperous. Easier to work with. I even – is this possible? – become almost tentative in my opinions and suggestions. Collegiate.
I feel both junior and special. Junior, because I am. By rank, age and experience. But also those intangibles. They’re both Londoners. Cardiff is, to them, not a capital city, but a provincial one, Western Vale, not a huge company. This fraud, just another case.
That, plus all those other little things. Those indicators of sophistication that people like these let fall like beads. Knowles wears ankle-skimming jeans in a sort of greeny yellow. Lavender cardigan worn over a pale grey T-shirt. The outfit is impeccably casual. Weekend wear. Not-trying-too-hard wear. And yet. The jeans are flatteringly skinny without being remotely tarty. The outfit is casual, but accessorized with a watch and bracelet, both of which look glossily expensive. The jeans themselves – what color are they even? I call them greeny yellow because I don’t have the vocabulary to be more precise. I guess Knowles herself would call them lime yellow, or greengage, or dusky citrus, or some other term which she’d produce without self-consciousness. When Brattenbury asks us if we want tea or coffee, she says, ‘Oh, I’d love an Americano. No, actually, you know what, I’ll have a caffè mocha, semi-skimmed, no cream,’ and all that – the initial order, the reversal, the precision of the final request – comes without that flicker of
ooh, look at me
which almost any Welsh woman would feel the need to insert. Any Welsh woman, including me, and when Knowles says ‘caffè mocha’, she says it in a way which indicates both that she is reasonably comfortable in Italian and that she doesn’t need to show off about it.
I say, ‘Can I just have a peppermint tea, please?’ and Knowles smiles at me, nicely, as if I’ve done something charming.
At the same time, I have something that they don’t. I’m still the tip on the end of their javelin. Still their only lead of consequence.
And, too, I’m aware of their respect. Has Knowles ever done anything like this? Has Brattenbury? I don’t know, but I doubt it. This hotel, the designery suite and the riot of windowboxes, is their way of saying,
We know this is hard. You’re doing well
.
Hang in there
.
At one point, I say, ‘Are we sure they’ll come and get me? It’s been eleven days.’
Brattenbury says, ‘They
have to
come and get you. You’re the only payroll clerk they’ve got. We keep dangling Roy Williams in front of their noses and they’re not interested. And as for earning their trust, you’ve done everything a police spy wouldn’t have done. Operationally speaking, I think things have gone pretty much perfectly.’
I laugh: I think Brattenbury has just forgiven my catfight with Quintrell.