The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (25 page)

I lean forward. Quintrell arranges a headband on me that contains speakers over the ears. The music comes out way too loud at first. I complain and Quintrell adjusts the settings a bit, puts the thing on shuffle.

It’s still loud, though. I can hear almost nothing else. I lose touch with the movement of the car too, whether it’s fast or slow, jerky or not. In my altered world, I can only feel my breath fingering the folds of black cotton, the pressure of the eye-mask, the clamor of some indie rockers from the Valleys.

I think,
For all I know, Henderson knows who I am.

I think,
For all I know, he is taking me away to kill me
.

I can’t connect with those thoughts, though. Not really. Can’t connect with anything much. Not Brattenbury. Not Buzz. Not my real mission here. So I let my thoughts go wherever they feel most comfortable and that turns out to be a Fiona Grey place, not a me place. I think of my time with Amina. Her saying, ‘We are sisters now,’ as she turned out the light. Think of my lecherous lawyer, George Noble, and the visa he will secure.

Speech therapy? I’ve looked at those books which Henderson brought me and I like them. If I wanted, at the end of this, I could make a new life for myself in New Zealand, teaching disabled kids to practice saying
la-la-la
and
ta-ta-ta
. That idea doesn’t feel ridiculous. Part of me wants it. Part of me is already there. A small, clean office in a small, clean town. Green hills on the horizon and rugby burbling from the radio.

La-la-la.

Ta-ta-ta.

And again, please.
La-la-la. Ta-ta-ta
. One more time.

I don’t try to read direction from the movements of the car. For one thing, I can’t. For another thing, I already know where I’m going, or assume I do.

As soon as Henderson started talking about bringing me ‘into the center of this project’, I told Brattenbury. He checked flights in and out of Bangalore. Checked bookings for hotel and conference centers within a thirty-minute perimeter of Heathrow.

Easy pickings. Henderson had booked another conference suite in another Heathrow hotel, taking it for five days, and had called to check such things as availability of sufficient power points and the existence of a secure data connection. He’d also booked hotel rooms for himself plus four at a second hotel a few minutes’ drive away.

Brattenbury is working now to have the hotel rooms and conference suite wired for sound and images. He’s planted SOCA operatives acting as maids and waiters. He’s got the hotel managements to agree to share their booking data with him. If they hadn’t agreed, he’d have secured a warrant.

I wonder if Brattenbury has told those managements what the firearms boys of SCO19 might do to their daintily manicured conference suites. I’m guessing not.

Brattenbury told me: ‘As far as you can, Fiona, just relax. We’ve done this before. We’re not expecting armed resistance. And in any case, we will move in with overwhelming force.’

I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘They may seek to intimidate or threaten you. They may wish to remind you of Sajid Kureishi and what happens to those who cross them. But you have nothing to fear. They need your expertise. This is the endgame now.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Remember that these people are highly security conscious, so please don’t be concerned if they take precautions.’

‘No, sir.’

Precautions
. Being stripped. An intimate skin, hair and cavity search. A change of clothes. Eye-mask. Hood. A switch of cars. Rock music.
Please don’t be concerned
.

I’m not concerned.

Not concerned, that is, until after some hours have, I guess, passed. Enough hours, easily, to get us to Heathrow. We left Pontcanna at half past two, so it must be after six now, perhaps well after.

Then the going changes abruptly. A couple of steep ascents. Hard bends in the road. A left turn onto a rough surface. Too rough for tarmac, no matter how potholed. A country track. At one point Henderson misjudges something and the car bottom scrapes on something hard. In a gap between tracks, I hear Henderson swear softly. Quintrell starts to say something, but Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics starts to tell me, yet again, about laying back, head on the grass, and I can’t hear anything more.

The car stops.

Doors bang open and closed. Henderson removes the headphones from me and says, ‘We’re here. Are you OK?’

‘Do I have to listen to any more Stereophonics?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’m OK.’

The noise and the sightlessness has disoriented me. I can feel my voice is clumsy. Not my own.

Henderson tells me that he’s going to lead me inside. It’s not just my voice which is clumsy. It’s my movements too. I clamber out OK, but have pins and needles in my thigh and ask to lean against the car, waiting for feeling to return.

As we stand there, a fox yelps somewhere in the silence. A bird breaks cover from a tree. I hear its heavy flapping overhead. There is no engine noise, no jets.

Either Heathrow has decided to close its flight paths down for the day or we aren’t within a hundred miles of the place and Adrian Brattenbury has no idea where I am.

Please don’t be concerned
.

Then, when I’m ready, Henderson takes me by an arm and leads me over to a door. We go inside and down a few steps. Henderson asks me to sit and I lower myself gingerly on what turns out to be a soft surface, a sofa or bed.

‘Lean forward, please.’

I lower my head. The movement bares the nape of my neck. Vertebrae forming landing lights for the executioner’s axe, the murderer’s billhook.

No axe, no billhook.

Henderson fiddles with the pullcord, catches my hair, apologizes, undoes the knot. Removes hood and eye-mask.

There’s way too much light around me and I immediately close my eyes. Henderson rubs the top of my back. ‘OK, take your time. I know these things are disorienting, believe me. Just say if you want anything to eat or drink.’

I do take my time and slowly make sense of my surroundings.

I’m in a small white-painted room, no phone, no windows. There’s a bed, on which I’m now sitting, a bedside table, a lamp, a chest of drawers, a small sink. There’s a glass vase containing daffodils by the bed. I touch them: they’re real, not fake. The bed has clean linen, a set of folded towels, a bathrobe. On the chest of drawers, there is a packet of clean underwear, a couple of T-shirts, socks. Also a toothbrush, toothpaste, two bars of that tiny paper-wrapped hotel soap, and some pale green shampoo in a clear plastic bottle.

I stand up, move around, recover my senses. The T-shirts are in XS, my size. I open the shampoo and sniff. It smells of apple.

‘Apple,’ I say.

Henderson watches me reorder myself. Says, ‘This is your room. Anna will be staying just next to you.’ He taps the wall. ‘The accommodation here is fairly basic, but if there’s anything you want or need, please ask and we will try to provide it. Toilet and shower room here.’ He leads me upstairs. ‘Exercise room. More bedrooms through there. Common room here.’

The ‘common room’ is painted white, beige carpet. Chairs and sofas. A TV screen. Some books and magazines. A little kitchenette with tea and coffee things, a little sink. Bottles of water. A wicker basket that contains small plastic packets of biscuits. There are more flowers here. More daffs. No windows.

At the head of the little flight of steps, commanding the front door, there’s a man in an old flannel shirt and a leather jacket. He is reading the
Sun
. He is developing a slight paunch, but is otherwise muscled and tough-looking. On a little table beside him, he has a cup of tea, some lo-cal sweeteners, two chocolate digestives, and a pistol.

I don’t know much about guns, but I think this is a Glock, a standard police weapon.

I don’t know much about lo-cal sweeteners, but I do know they’re less effective when taken with chocolate digestives.

‘This is Geoff,’ says Henderson. ‘He’s here to look after us.’

Geoff waves a hand. Quintrell – who’s changed into a knee-length black dress – exits her room, trots upstairs, and goes through a big wooden door, which leads I don’t know where.

Something clicks. Back at her house, when I was getting ready to strip, I was struck by her clothes. Jeans and a jumper. Not the sort of thing that a woman like Quintrell would have worn to a big business meeting in a Heathrow hotel. She’s attached to her own self-image as a professional woman. She’d have worn a skirt or a dress. Heels. A trouser suit at the very minimum. Quintrell’s initial outfit tells me that we’re in proper countryside. Not some golf-club-’n’-country-club version of the countryside either, but the real thing. A place with farm animals, ditches, bad tracks and muck.

We will move in with overwhelming force
, Brattenbury promised me, but he probably didn’t know how easy a promise it would be to keep. How much force do you need to overwhelm an empty conference room? How many men needed to arrest a room full of absences?

Please don’t be concerned
.

‘Am I in prison?’ I ask, which isn’t a very eloquent way to phrase the question, but is the way it comes out.

‘The meeting rooms are through here,’ says Henderson. ‘Your presence there will be required off and on over the next few days. Meals will be served either there or in the common room. You’ll find that the windows are all shuttered. I request that you do not make any attempt to look out of them. Also that you do not go outside. Is that clear?’

‘You mean “yes”. That’s the answer to my question.’

‘The answer to your question is “no”. You will be here for a few days, then we will return you to Cardiff. While you are here, we ask you to respect a few rules. That’s all.’

He asks if I want anything. I say I want to shower, then eat. He tells me that Geoff will sort me out. He’s impatient to get away. I can hear voices and footfall from the door that Quintrell went through. The occasional burst of noisy laughter. Henderson has not been unkind particularly, but my claims on his patience are expiring fast.

I let him go.

I ask Geoff about food. He produces a menu. Scrambled egg. Ditto, with bacon, sausage and tomato. A range of sandwiches. Soup of the day.

‘Soup of the
day
?’ I say. ‘What
is
this place?’

‘Soup today was parsnip. Didn’t taste of much, I don’t think. They do a good sandwich though. They do chips too, if you want them.’

I ask for a sandwich, some salad, no chips. He calls someone with my order. An intercom thing, not an external line. There are no external lines here that I’ve seen. No mobile phones either. ‘Give it twenty minutes,’ he advises. ‘They’ve got their hands full at the moment.’

I get a towel from my bed and go to the shower room.

After a few hours with my head in that hood, my breath hanging wet and foggy around my cheeks, I feel clammy and unclean. I spend ten minutes under the shower. A blast of warm water and soap. Wash my hair and dry it with one of those built-in dryers that hotels have.

Stare at myself in the mirror.

Fiona Grey, looking vaguely sporty in her pale grey trackies and white T-shirt. Hair longer than I’m used to. A face that means nothing to me, or nothing I can read anyway.

We look at each other through the glass for a while, then grow bored.

I go off to find Geoff.

Ask if he has a ciggy. He says no, and the common room is no smoking. But he says can get me some ciggies and there’s a small room where I can smoke.

Ask if there’s any chance of getting some weed. He laughs and says, ‘Doubt it.’

I say, ‘What time is it?’

He checks his watch – not disguising the dial – and says coming up to nine o’clock. That’s more than six hours after we left Quintrell’s house. Enough time to have gone pretty much anywhere in England or Wales. Time enough to reach southern Scotland.

Geoff says, ‘It’s weird, isn’t it, not knowing the time. Gets you disoriented.’

He also says, dropping his voice, ‘And just so you know, I’m Special Branch. Here to keep an eye on you. Any problems, I’m on it.’

I don’t say much to that. My sandwich comes. There’s a knock at the door, Geoff enters a passcode to open it, deals with whoever’s at the door. The food arrives on a tray that someone’s nicked from MacDonald’s. It’s a ‘club’ sandwich, which turns out to mean chicken, bacon and some bits of salad.

I eat. Drink some water. Read about speech therapy.

Then Geoff goes off for a pee, taking his Glock with him when he goes. I lope out of the common room, through the doors that Quintrell and Henderson both used.

Emerge into a large, converted barn. Stone walls, partially exposed. Huge timber beams. A fancy wooden atrium, double doors beyond, shading the noise of a dozen or more voices. I open the door. A sudden loudening of the conversation. Some Indian faces. White ones. A couple of waitresses, dressed in black, holding trays, but also standing close to each other. Village girls, I guess. Not pros. Close to each other, because they’re not used to this kind of thing and are buddying up for mutual support.

No one really notices my entry, except the waitresses. One of them offers me a drink, the other a tray of canapés. I ignore the canapés, take a glass of red wine.

Quintrell is close to me, but is standing with her back to me, talking to an Indian guy in a suit. Henderson is the far side of the room, side on to me. I don’t really notice the room itself. Just have an impression of it. One impressive stone wall. A big fireplace with a log fire crackling away. Copper wall lamps, expensive-looking. A couple of big timber pillars, supporting a gallery. Raw oak. Everything fancy.

I push through the people to Henderson. I don’t think he sees me, as such, just sees movement in his peripheral vision, turns to check it. He’s wearing a dark suit, white shirt, silk tie.

‘Fiona,’ he says, or starts to say.

Might have said more, except that by this time I’ve thrown my red wine in his face. My glass too.

Leaped at him.

Kicking. Hitting. Scratching. Biting.

This isn’t fighting the way my friend Lev taught me. There’s no science in this, no carefully gauged aggression. This is strictly playground stuff. Fiona Grey keeps her nails fairly long, and I feel them drag down Henderson’s cheek. Feel her fist knot in his thinning hair.