The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6)

by Harry Bingham

  Jones gives me a look that somehow manages to take in me, the headless corpse, the corpseless head, the bucketfuls of blood, the sword, the spears, and imply, ‘you want to get a feel for the man? You haven’t already got some hints?’

  But since he doesn’t actually say anything, and since I don’t curl up and start mewing, and since procedure does in fact require that key team members have a reasonable familiarity with the crime scene, in the end he nods.

  ‘Five minutes, then brief your team.’

  He heads off to annoy someone else.

  Jon leaves, show-pony style, kicking his fetlocks and tossing his prettily braided mane.

  Me, I start with the corpse itself, trying to avoid treading on any significant blood-marks, though that’s easier said than done.

  Gaynor Charteris’s hands are clean enough, but have a pale tan, even here in a Welsh Marchtime, even under the pallor of death. Her fingernails, worn short, have the sort of scraped-out grey colour you get if soil has collected under your nails and you want to make a reasonable shot at tidying up. She has that sinewy, fifty-something, outdoors look which, out in villages like this, usually goes with dog ownership, but I see no sign of a dog. No leash in the hallway, no hairs on the sofa.

  The incisions on the neck look interesting too. It looks to me as if the front of the throat was cut by something sharp enough to slice through the soft tissue in a single stroke. Beyond that, there are signs of multiple hacking blows, the ones that finally severed the head. It’s hard to feel the edge of the sword properly through latex gloves, but it feels bluntish to me. A decorative piece, not a fighting one. And if that’s right, it looks like my putative local maniac came here with a sharp knife, neatly slit Charteris’s throat, then used the broadsword to complete the beheading.

  And the spears? Either they were carefully made beforehand and brought here. Or Charteris happened to have a nice trio of antique spearheads conveniently fastened to some seriously non-antique broom handles. Or someone stole the spearheads from Charteris, turned them into actual spears, then came back to plunge them into the chest of a woman who was already dead.

  That’s not very maniac, if you ask me, but no one did.

  I take a brisk gander round the rest of the house. Everything tidy. Everything orderly. Everything consistent with the age, sex and occupation of the deceased. With this quiet, leafy, sunlit street.

  No dog.

  There are a pair of very muddy gloves drying in the kitchen.

  The garden shed has a few ordinary garden implements, all dry.

  It’s odd. Something I’ve noticed before. When a person dies, their presence in a home seems to swell initially. Everything exhales the dead person’s personality. Their hopes, their fears, their loss. Then, as relatives and officialdom nibble at the scene – items removed for evidence, valuables packed and stored, utility accounts terminated, the house cleaned – the dead person starts to fade until you can hardly feel their print.

  But right now is the peak of the peak. I feel Charteris in every speck of dust, in every bloody smear. When I’m not in the living room downstairs with her, I feel slightly weirded out, like someone is talking to me and I’ve simply turned my back. And when I am in the living room, it feels strange if I can’t directly see her head, preferably her face itself.

  I haven’t yet got my usual feel for the victim. Partly, poor dear, that’s because her head has been hacked off with a broadsword and those things can be unsettling. The set of her face – glassy, pale, unseeing, shocked – is, presumably, not standard-issue Gaynor Charteris. But it’s more than that. This outdoorsy woman, with her short grey hair and practical hands, has some quality that eludes me. I might capture it, perhaps, if I had longer here, but I know I don’t have long before Jones will toss me out.

  And then I notice something that has been bothering me since I first came in. Or not bothering, but nagging.

  One of those things you see, but don’t see that you see.

  Standing Charteris’s head on that little corner bureau could be taken, in a way, as simple trophy display. ‘Look what I’ve done! Here’s the body, here’s the head.’ Except if you were aiming at some kind of triumphal display, this tucked-away corner is a hopeless choice. Better to place the head on the corpse. Or the coffee table. Or in the window. Or almost anything.

  So perhaps the placement of the head was more accidental. More like: ‘OK, that’s sorted. Now let’s grab the laptop and the iPhone. No, you dummy, you can’t go out like that. You’re still carrying the old lady’s head. Yep, down there, that’ll do. Now let’s fuck off and hope no one notices we’re covered with blood.’

  That’s possible. Murders are shocking to the perpetrator as well as to the victim. People do stupid things. Make mistakes. Botch the job.

  But someone, probably, arrived here with three homemade spears and arranged them carefully in a dead woman’s chest. That’s not really stupid-mistake territory, so I want to bet that the placement of the head has its own dark significance.

  But what?

  Charteris’s empty eyes are turned towards the wall, where there hangs a piece of framed text, in that hard-to-read medieval script. I take a photo of the text for later reference, but try to read it anyway. It says, I think, something like this:

  Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum . . . Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.

  —Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae

  I don’t understand Latin – though ‘Britannorum’ and ‘repellunt barbari’ presumably mean something like what you’d think they mean – but I feel the tug of that ancient world, its torments and darknesses. Perhaps there, in that tug, is an important part of Gaynor Charteris herself.

  I feel the flicker of her. Some stronger sense of the woman herself.

  I’d like to stay with that flicker, sense her better, but Jones comes up behind me.

  ‘Do you have a feel for the perpetrator yet, Sergeant? I said five minutes.’

  He’s one of those officers who deploys sarcasm the way Russian riot police deploy batons, but I don’t care. I float above. I swim below.

  ‘Yes, sir. May I ask, have we secured the victim’s place of work?’

  ‘Place of work, Sergeant? She worked for the Open University. She worked from home mostly.’

  ‘I think she was working on a dig.’ I mention the muddy boots, the gloves, the recently dirty fingernails, and the absence of a dog or visible gardening activity. ‘She’s an archaeologist, after all.’

  That pauses the sarcasm assault. Procedure does indeed require that any scene potentially connected to a murder be secured as soon as possible.

  ‘Good catch. When you’re researching local angles, ask around for any locations where she may have been working. We’ll get officers there as soon as possible.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  I make my exit, hopscotching through the blood puddles in my parachute-suit and my non-tear paper overshoes. The street is still sunny. Still catkiny. The ginger tom is still there, his parts now beautifully clean.

  Gaynor Charteris is already maybe my third best ever corpse, runner up only to the beauties that were Alina ‘Carlotta’ Mishchenko and the ever-wonderful Mary Langton.

  I wait four hundred and fifty-three days, then up pops a beauty.

  3

  I do my job.

  Do it in a way that even Bleddyn Jones couldn’t find fault with, not even if he were tramping after me, spitting bullet points and beardy irritation.

  I’ve been given a team of three. One of them, Joe Harris, is a village resident of long-standing. He is quick to speak to two local vicars, the school headmaster, the people in the village store, the post office and the barber shop. The other two constables are, like me, native-born Taffs without local knowledge, but they troop sturdily from house to house, asking questions and collecting up answers. I stay on top of all that, but I also hit the phone, struggling thr
ough our beloved mental health bureaucracy, trying to locate any nutters with a known interest in swords, spears and beheadings.

  Nada, nothing, nix.

  No known nutters.

  No one, except Charteris herself, with a fondness for broadswords and antique spearheads.

  The local nutter hypothesis was never, I thought, excessively plausible but, fair play, you do have to test these things, no matter what.

  We also, rapidly, ascertain where Gaynor Charteris was muddying her boots. The village name, Dinas Powys, means something like ‘fort of the country-dwellers’ and, sure enough, a short distance out of the village, in Cwm George, there’s a low hill with the remains of an Iron Age fort. The site has been excavated before, back in the 1950s, but, it seems, Charteris was keen to re-explore it and enlisted a number of students from Cardiff to get the project started.

  As soon as I have that information, I relay it to Jones, who sends a couple of uniforms up the hill to take guard.

  An hour later, with my team ticking away nicely and no urgent leads emerging, I check in with Jones. Nudge him into sending me up the hill to Cwm George, which he does with only a flicker of irritation.

  I drive up there.

  A small parking area, mostly for dog walkers, I guess.

  Walking boots from the back of my car. Fleece.

  A stony path curves into a forest.

  Beech trees, ivy, and a dark gleam of ferns. Noises muted by the trees. Further in, any connection with the outside world is lost completely. It’s as though, round the next bend, a knight might come cantering up on a pale-grey charger. A jingle of spurs and a flutter of silk caparisons. The feeling is strong enough, and weird enough, that I actually call one of the uniforms. Check I’m heading in the right direction.

  I am, and soon find what I’m after.

  A rise of ground. The ramparts of a fort, still discernible. And, just below, a small green Portakabin, its door open to an indecisive breeze. There’s a lock on the door, a padlock, but the hasp has been torn out of the flimsy wall and the thing just swings loose, screws dangling in space.

  I enter the cabin.

  The two uniforms are there, along with three others, students from the look of them. Two boys, both with longish hair, and a tall, skinny girl with pale, luminous skin. They all wear heavy boots, old jeans, warm coats. Mud on boots and knees.

  The cabin has a few folding camp chairs. Some shelving down one side, muddy, like everything else, but sort of clean too. Like someone’s been taking care to wipe things down and sweep up, no matter how basically. There’s a stack of heavy tools in one corner – spades, forks, mattocks – and some smaller tools – trowels, brushes, hammers – tidily arranged on the shelf beside them. There’s an orange plastic washing bowl and two big plastic water containers, fifty litres, or something like that. The shelves are otherwise clear. On a portable gas-stove, a kettle is coming to the boil.

  ‘Typical CID,’ says the uniform nearest the kettle. ‘Always arrive in time for tea.’

  He makes tea, the regular sort. I always carry peppermint teabags with me, but just for today I think I’ll face the big, bad caffeine monster.

  The students introduce themselves. Katie, Mitch and Rob. Katie – complicated braided dark blonde hair, nose-piercing, a spray of star-tattoos behind one ear – seems like the queen of this little band and the others visibly defer.

  They all have the jerky movements and speech rhythms of unfaked shock. Rob, reaching for a stool to sit on, misses it with his hand, stumbles and refocuses. When he reaches for the stool the second time, he’s successful, but his face is tight with concentration. When he speaks, he does so with a clumsy, over-articulated clarity.

  I turn to the non-kettle-occupied uniform, Rhys. Ask him to bring me up to speed. He tells me that he and his colleague have taken basic statements, the gist of which is that, yes, the three students all knew and worked with Dr Charteris. The dig was happy and productive. They all got along fine. No one knew of anyone with a grudge against the archaeologist, nor did she seem troubled or fearful in any way.

  Just one thing.

  Katie, gripping the side-shelving, asks, ‘Do you know where all our stuff is? Our finds?’

  The uniforms look at me to see if I know.

  Nope. Nothing to do with me.

  I ask Katie what’s missing.

  ‘Everything basically. Not our tools, those are all there, but everything else.’

  Shocked eyes sweeping the emptiness and returning. Everything is just that little bit off. Her timing, her fluidity. Everything.

  I say, ‘OK, sorry, everyone please leave the cabin.’

  I shoo everyone out. If stuff has been stolen, we have to presume there’s some connection with the murder down the hill. That means that, forensically compromised as the cabin now is, we have to take it seriously as a crime scene.

  We re-assemble on the grass outside.

  I ask about the project and it emerges that the dig had only been going for three weeks, an exploratory excavation in preparation for a much bigger project in the summer. These preliminary works had already confirmed the basic richness of the site.

  The braids-’n’-tattoos Katie says, ‘What we’ve got here is a really good Iron Age hill fort. There are thousands of them all over Britain, many hundreds in Wales alone, and this one isn’t particularly large. But it is well-defended.’ She starts pointing out the natural slope of the hill, its multiple levels of ditch-and-rampart defences.

  ‘OK, go on’: my uncertain contribution to the discussion. It’s hard to know what to ask because it’s hard to see what could possibly be at stake.

  Katie continues. ‘So in about 43 CE – that’s AD in old money – the Romans invade Britain. They don’t reach south Wales for some time, but when they do, this area slowly Romanises. Although the Romans are technically in control of all of Wales, their rule to the north and west of here is military only. You only get real Roman villas and all the rest of it down here in Glamorgan.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But with the Romans keeping the peace, forts like this one fell out of service. You didn’t need this kind of military wellie, when you’ve got Augustus’s Second Legion a day’s march away in Caerleon. So yes, the site was probably inhabited, but was no longer of particular importance.’

  ‘And nothing valuable?’ I ask. ‘I mean no horde of gold and silver? Nothing to provide a motive for murder?’

  ‘Not at all. I mean, what we found had some value. A few Roman coins. Some nails. Some bits of pottery. But you can pick those sort of things up on eBay for a few quid. There’s historical value, yes, but monetary value? No. Nothing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I feel disappointed. Our one little lead seems to be vanishing into nothingness. A candle flame flickering on the blue edge of extinction.

  And yet the thefts: those were real. That broken hasp, it’s real too.

  Katie isn’t done. She’s eager to get to the next part, in fact. ‘But look, the real glory of this site is what happened after the Romans left.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK. It’s the end of the fourth century. The Roman empire is being attacked from the north and east. Large parts of the empire are using German troops anyway, and those troops start to think, the hell with this, we’ll just grab everything for ourselves. So the Romans start to panic. First of all, they withdraw from the north and west of Britain, from areas like this. Then, in about 410 CE, they withdraw all their troops. All of them. They tell the British, sorry and all that, but you’re on your own now. Goodbye and good luck.’

  ‘Not brilliant news, presumably.’

  ‘Not at all. All of a sudden, places like Dinas Powys become important again. They get reoccupied. Refortified. Once again, they’re the safest places to be. And right here, where we’re sitting now, is a fantastic site. It’s got these great defences. It’s in the richest part of Wales. It’s right on the coast, close to an excellent harbour. If you were a British nobleman
at the dawn of the Dark Ages, this site would give you everything. Security. Trade. Wine from Spain and Italy. An opportunity to keep the good times going. That’s why Dinas Powys is so important. It’s got the most important collection of early Dark Age material anywhere in Wales. There aren’t many sites in England which come close.’

  She starts telling me more about what they’ve found. Evidence that a jeweller was once busy here. Also a blacksmith. Animal stock-holding: an earlier dig found twenty-two thousand animal bones.

  ‘And the stuff that was stolen. Was there anything there? I mean, anything that mattered historically, leave aside the financial aspect.’

  Katie shakes her head. ‘Not really. We’re really only prospecting, remember. Figuring out our strategy for the summer. So, yes, we found enough to support our view that this site is going to be really great, but no, there was no individual piece which made us go wow.’

  I ask, ‘Did Charteris ever come up here alone. Did she ever dig by herself?’

  Katie – and the others – all laugh at that, a little embarrassed perhaps.

  Katie, tiptoeing round her answer, says, ‘Gaynor lived on her own. Her kids are in Australia. She loved archaeology. Yes, I think she had plenty of friends, but maybe not so many in the local area. So, of course she came up here whenever she could. She loved this place.’

  That’s code, I think, for saying that Charteris was mildly obsessive. Perhaps more than mildly.

  I think of that stern, outdoorsy, short-haired head in its little suburban cul-de-sac below. The way her gaze was fixed on that bit of Latin text. It makes no sense, no sense at all, but I have this stupid feeling that it was Charteris herself who, in death, swivelled on her stump of a neck to find that bit of Gildas again.

  Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.

  I feel that flicker again. That flicker which whispers somehow of the real Charteris. Our victim, our corpse, our head.

  Tucking that thought away for later, I say, ‘OK, and just say she’d found, I don’t know, a Roman goblet. Gold, rubies, whatever. Who owns it? What happens next.’