Free The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths by Harry Bingham

because they were real people, with real addresses. The audit software used to detect payroll frauds would never have flashed an alert faced with these names.
    Yet, I don’t think the names were chosen by accident. Hayley Morgan was an isolated stroke victim with some cognitive impairments. Adele Gibson is learning impaired and relies on a social worker for help with basic household finance and the like. People like that don’t always have the tools needed to challenge strange behavior in their finances – and until the last few months, they hadn’t actually been made any worse off by the scam. They were carefully chosen targets. Chosen by someone in a position to pick.
    I nudge Jackson. He nudges the Fraud Squad. They discover that Sajid Kureishi’s sister-in-law, Razia Riaz, worked as a receptionist at Cardiff Social Care Services in Grangetown. Discover that she had interfered with the flow of correspondence in order to keep care workers in the dark.
    She’s arrested and charged with fraud. Under interrogation, she admitted that she had, a year and a half back, obtained the signatures needed from Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan to gain access to their bank accounts. I wasn’t present at the arrest or the interrogation, but Gethin Stephens, the new Fraud Squad DI, told me that she was a nasty piece of work, venomous and vindictive, and with no apparent remorse for the consequences of her actions.
    The CPS are considering a manslaughter charge and I hope they go ahead.
    And that’s the story as we now have it. Kureishi found a way to penetrate corporate computers. His sister-in-law found a way to generate appropriate payroll dummies for the fraud. The pair of them obtained some false identity documents and set up a bank account which they used to channel their money. The first of them is dead, the second awaiting prosecution. We don’t know quite why Kureishi went on the run and probably never will, but he must have got scared that his partners in organized crime were getting tired of him. He stole what he could. Ran when he could. And got killed anyway.
    That’s all I really know. I do my regular work and try to remember that I have a life.
    When Buzz asks if I have a swimsuit, I say I have no swimsuits but two bikinis. He asks if my passport is valid. I say that I’ve checked and it is.
    And strange to say, I find I’m excited by the prospect of holiday. I’ve never felt that before. I’ve normally avoided holiday completely or approached it with a kind of anxiety. But this feels different. And when Buzz says, ‘Are you looking forward to it?’, I say, ‘I am, I really am.’ When he laughs at me, I laugh too.

12.
    Wednesday 9 November . Two weeks and two days before Buzz and I fly out to Miami. I get a call from Jackson.
    ‘Do you have a minute?’ he says. He speaks with an unusual gentleness, the way he might if I actually had a choice.
    I go up. His office: a large, black leatherette sofa, a couple of art prints on the wall, one of those pointless office plants – a stringy palmate thing, that sits in a ceramic pot full of what looks like ceramic gravel.
    On the sofa, Brattenbury, wearing a dark jacket over a plum-colored V-neck. He looks cooler than coppers are meant to look. Makes Jackson look older and tireder than he really is.
    I sit down.
    ‘Fiona, you remember Adrian Brattenbury. He’s the Senior Investigating Officer on Operation Tinker.’
    ‘ Tinker? ’
    Brattenbury says, ‘The computer allocates names. We don’t pick ‘em.’
    ‘Adrian, if you want to give Fiona a quick overview.’
    There’s a smoked glass coffee table in front of the sofa. Papers on it, including some six by ten photo sheets, but turned so I can’t see them.
    Brattenbury nods, but first looks straight at me and says, ‘Nice to meet you properly. I understand Dennis here has a lot of faith in you.’
    I don’t know what to say to that, so I just sit. When Brattenbury figures out that I’m not going to say