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

by Harry Bingham

  Katie’s answer is that it’s the local landowner who would profit, not the person who found the object. And anyway, ‘Gaynor didn’t care about money. She’d have no interest in any of that.’

  I try a few other questions. Get nothing of interest. Call Jones.

  He, predictably, isn’t impressed. The theft is significant enough that he wants to keep some police presence on site – which means the uniforms get to drink more tea, up here amongst these blowing trees, these ancient ramparts – but ‘I want you back on the local angle. You can’t keep an eye on your men from up there.’

  As it happens, I have been staying in fairly close touch with my three guys throughout, the ten or fifteen minutes I’ve been talking to Katie my longest interruption yet.

  But I’m a good girl. I do as he says.

  Ask the uniforms to stay on site. Ask Jones to get some forensics guys up here. Meantime, the kids want to get back to Cardiff. Katie, it turns out, is a postgraduate student, researching for her doctorate. The other two are undergraduates, hence Katie’s air of authority.

  We walk, the four of us, down the side of the cabin towards the path back to the parking area. Katie, I realise, is tearing up. I tell the other two to go on, and say, ‘Katie?’

  She wipes her eyes, the blue of old seas and far horizons, and says, ‘I mean, who does that? Kill Gaynor of all people. And this dig. It’s totally fucked now. It’s just . . .’

  Her lips tremble with unfaked emotion. Katie’s clearly upset about her friend and colleague, but it seems like Katie is almost equally upset about the project. That seems like a weird thing to be so upset about, but violent bereavements are weird. People react in funny ways.

  Her little squall of grief subsides.

  At the corner of the cabin, there’s a tangle of long grass and fallen leaves, black and heavy with damp. She kicks at the tangle, loses her footing and has to grab at the cabin wall to steady herself.

  ‘Fuck it.’ She pauses as she catches her breath, which is jerky and asthmatic. When she’s ready, she jabs again with her foot at something in the tangle below her. ‘Well, they didn’t get that anyway.’

  ‘That’ appears to be a right-angled bit of stone, a stump of masonry, now very much corroded by time. It looks like the sort of thing which, if you found it in your garden, you’d throw on the nearest skip. Mossy, dirty, broken, useless.

  I raise my eyebrows. ‘Well, gee, Katie. It’s lucky they didn’t get that.’

  She stares at me, then laughs.

  ‘OK, I know it doesn’t look like much.’

  ‘But really it’s a priceless . . . um, I don’t know, help me out here.’

  ‘It’s old. We haven’t yet had it tested, but the appearance is consistent with the early medieval period, possibly even the very start of the Dark Ages.’

  ‘A lump of stone?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not a lump, is it? It’s carved.’ She pushes back the grass so I can see better. ‘It’s probably the angle from a stone cross, or burial stone. I mean, that’s a nice find, whatever, but it’s better than that. Look.’

  She gathers herself a second, then wanders a few feet away. Pulls an ordinary lump of stone out of the ground and lays it beside the possibly-ancient bit of cross. The two things are different. The stones aren’t the same.

  I see that, but don’t know what Katie’s getting at.

  She stares at me, like I’m supposed to know. The click-click-click of a shocked brain figuring out ordinary human interactions.

  Then she gets there. Restarts.

  ‘It’s basic geology,’ she says. ‘The rock here is all Triassic. If you’re a Dark Age Christian wanting to carve a cross or even just build a house, you’re going to use the stuff kicking around under your feet. This stone looks Silurian, possibly Ordovician. There’s plenty of that stuff in north and mid Wales. Ireland too for that matter. But around here? Nothing.’

  I shake my head. I can’t quite believe I’m discussing Welsh geology as part of an investigation, but then again I don’t know what matters or why, and until I do then everything has to matter.

  I try to get my head round this latest nugget.

  ‘So, someone brought a lump of rock here – by ship presumably – then carved a cross.’

  ‘Or, more likely,’ corrects Katie, ‘carved the rock in north or mid Wales, then brought it here.’

  ‘Which sounds like a lot of hassle, when there’s plenty of stone right here.’

  ‘Exactly. So why would anyone want to do that?’

  I shake my head. The puzzles of the present day seem strange enough without bringing mysteries from sixteen centuries back.

  We stare at each other a few seconds.

  She has no answer to my puzzles. I have no answers to hers.

  We walk down to the carpark and she’s about to join her fellow students in a scruffy blue Ford Fiesta, when I say, ‘Katie, how are you with spears? I mean, can you tell antiques from fakes?’

  ‘In a laboratory? Yes.’

  ‘And if I just showed you one?’

  ‘Then maybe. It depends.’

  I ask her to come with me. Promise her we’ll get her back to town in a squad car, if we have to. She says yes, says fine.

  We drive down the hill. I check in with my team of three. Joe Harris has been keeping things under efficient control and our Contacts Made list is already looking plump and healthily stocked. There are still a few gaps. Charteris sang in a local choir and we’d like to speak to as many of those people as possible. But we’ve done well and I say so.

  Out on the concrete ramp in front of Charteris’s garage, I report in to Jones. He’s grumpy but not actively critical. Tells me to keep going.

  ‘Yes, sir. Just one thing. I have an antiquities expert with me, a Katie Smith. I thought you might want her to take a look at the sword and the spearheads.’

  Jones looks darkly suspicious, narrowing his eyes like a man considering a bet on a street game of three-card monte.

  He looks for the con, can’t find it, so tells me, grudgingly, that if the forensics boys are happy to let a ‘member of the public in’, he’ll allow it.

  I want to argue at that. Calling Katie a ‘member of the public’ makes her sound like she’s a murder-scene tourist, instead of what she actually is: an archaeologist offering us a free, instant and expert appraisal of a key aspect of the crime scene.

  I don’t actually say that, but I also don’t do that prettily-maned fetlock-kicking thing, so I think I lose points anyway.

  I get Katie.

  ‘This will be rough, I’m afraid. It’s not particularly pretty in there.’

  A terse nod signals her understanding.

  A CSI tells us that they’ve completed sample-taking and photography. He still gives us protective suits, overshoes, haircaps and latex gloves, ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

  We go into the house.

  Someone has covered Charteris’s head with a pale-blue cloth. The stump of her neck too. The room is bright with halogen task-lighting, rigged up for the photography. Already the old living room is vanishing, being replaced by something else. It’s like those fast-forward films you see of life in the jungle. Animals dying and collapsing into carrion. Larger animals snatching the meat. Birds of prey cleaning the bones. Then ants and insects. Mould. The moss and the rain and the sunlight and the leaf-fall. And you watch those things, fascinated by the upthrust of new life, and you’ve forgotten, almost forgotten, that what you’re watching is also a graveyard. A kind of burial.

  I try to find the scent of the dead woman. Her presence. It’s already fading.

  Dry white bones in the undergrowth.

  A life sketched in blood.

  Katie stays close. The stains on the floor are dry now. I avoid treading in any of the larger marks, because it’s now instinctive to do so, but Katie just treads where she wants. Blood rises in rust-coloured flakes as she passes.

  I stop at the feet of the corpse, the body.

&nbs
p; ‘Oh.’

  Katie has the expression of any newbie. I watch her closely to see if there’s anything else there – we can’t exclude the possibility that she knows something more than she’s reported so far – but her expression is faultless. Shocked, unsettled. Upset.

  That jerky breathing again.

  She pieces together the scene. Figures out what lies under the blue cloth on the computer table.

  ‘May I?’ she asks.

  There’s a CSI labelling up sample bags on the kitchen table. I pass the question to him with my eyes, and he shrugs and says, ‘Just look, don’t touch.’

  I lift the cloth for Katie.

  There’s the head again. Familiar now. Settling.

  That short grey hair. Those lightless eyes. The grimly disapproving mouth.

  I feel a kind of chuckle rising in me. A feeling of recognition. Or more than that even. Friendship. Fellowship.

  I’m pleased, in a way, that she has blood still spattering her hair. She liked her mud. The rhythms of the dig. The basic tools, the knees-down-in-the-dirtness of it all. She wouldn’t have wanted to be too polished up in death.

  As often, I want to put my hand out. Stroke the dead woman’s hair. Trace the curve of her face with my finger.

  Want to, but don’t.

  Katie looks at the head a few moments, says nothing, then I replace the cloth.

  We turn to the corpse. The sword and the spearheads.

  The sword she disposes of quickly.

  ‘This is a modern reproduction of an Anglo–Saxon style sword. There are websites that sell these things. It belonged to Gaynor, it hung up there—’ she points to the empty fixings ‘and it’s not old at all.’

  The spearheads, though, are a different matter.

  She kneels down to inspect them. Leans over. Wants to support herself with a hand on Charteris’s chest. Avoids doing so. Then leans more and does it anyway.

  She looks at all three spearheads up close and from every angle. Pulls away.

  ‘So?’ I ask.

  ‘Um, no promises, and I could tell for you definite if I had these in a lab . . .’

  ‘But . . .?’

  ‘I think they’re the real deal. If they’re fake, they’ve taken exceptional care with things like the pitting, the patina, even the basic quality of the ironwork.’

  She points to a slight kink in one of the spearheads, where the blade’s lozenge narrows to meet the shaft.

  ‘Ancient iron-making wasn’t particularly sophisticated, so their weapons weren’t particularly strong. It’s common to see that kind of bending in spears that have actually been used in battle. Modern reproductions almost never have that kind of kinking because people don’t want to buy something that looks wrong. I mean, I can’t be positive without more work, but I’d say these are real.’

  ‘Approximate era?’

  ‘I’d need a lab. Sorry.’

  ‘Wild guess?’

  ‘Oh, Iron Age. Roman. If they’re Anglo–Saxon, they’re relatively early.’

  She speaks casually about items that could easily pre-date Christianity.

  I say, ‘And they’re not Gaynor’s? I mean, you’d know if they were?’

  ‘Not Gaynor’s, no. She felt strongly about genuine antiques being stored properly in a museum. She’d happily have reproduction stuff or finds so minor no museum would want them. But those spearheads? No way.’

  She stands up. And as her attention widens away from the specific technical questions, she remembers where she is, what she’s looking at.

  Silently now, and without asking my permission, she lifts the cloth over Charteris’s head again.

  Looks, and murmurs, ‘Requiescat in pace.’ Rest in peace. She holds the dead woman’s gaze, then reverently lowers the cloth.

  I say, ‘You read Latin, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what this says?’

  I point her to the medieval fragment hanging on the wall. The one Charteris was looking at.

  ‘Oh, that? It’s Gildas. The groans of the Britons.’

  I don’t say anything, but my face probably does a ‘Gildas who?’ kind of look.

  Katie: ‘Gildas was a sixth-century monk. A saint, in fact. His writing is one of our earliest sources for the period.’

  And, reading the Latin, she translates:

  ‘To Agitius, thrice consul: the groans of the Britons . . . The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned. Gildas, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain.’

  ‘And the barbarians in question . . .?’

  ‘Northern tribes. Modern-day Scots and Irish basically.’

  She answers the question, but the words drop noiselessly, pebbles vanished in a well. We both share a sudden sense that it is almost disrespectful to be talking about these long-ago conflicts when what we are dealing with is a very twenty-first century corpse. It’s strange how this investigation, young as it is, keeps getting tugged under by the past, and the deep past at that.

  Stolen Dark Age finds. Iron Age spears. Gildas and his Latin lament.

  We leave.

  The air is different in the homes of the dead, I’ve noticed.

  Partly it’s the smell. Blood baking under those bright halogen lamps. The smell of our paper suits, something like that of a newly stocked stationery cupboard.

  But there’s also something boxy, closed in. Like the deceased person’s soul has mostly succeeded in clambering free of that old, messily biological contraption that now lies discarded on the floor, but hasn’t yet had the nerve to take that final leap. To exit the room, the house, the street, the village. To fly forth upon the wind, glittering and free and for ever.

  It’s a relief to be outside again, in this bright, ordinary air.

  I search around for a squad car leaving for Cardiff. Find one. Summon Katie. Her right foot drags a little as she walks towards it. When she notices, she looks angry and starts to walk with exaggerated care. I wonder if it’s a drug thing. Something she doesn’t want me to see.

  She gets into the car.

  Leaning down into the interior, I say, ‘They never came, did they?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Romans? They never came back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So the British were basically fucked, were they? The ones who were left behind.’

  Katie laughs and says in her crystal Oxbridgey English. ‘You tell me: you’re Welsh. Those Britons were your ancestors, not mine. From your point of view, I’m just another hairy-arsed barbarian.’

  She makes a hairy, scary barbarian face at me, then laughs. The awkward, coughing laugh of someone in grief.

  The car departs.

  Three ancient spears in a dead woman’s chest.

  A savage beheading.

  An island deserted by its Roman protectors.

  And a case that feels – almost – like it’s been worth the 452-day wait.

  4

  We get nowhere.

  We do everything right and we get nowhere.

  The forensics are slow but they come. Prints, aplenty. DNA, aplenty. A long slow process of teasing out who had legitimately been in Charteris’s house in the days before her death. But though there’s still a load of work to do, we have nothing that looks suspicious. Nothing useful.

  Also: nothing from cameras. Nothing useful on vehicle movements. Nothing from all my house-to-house stuff. No interesting local nutters. No recent killings with similar quasi-ritual elements.

  The case has had a lot of media interest, inevitably, which means we get a lot of phone calls, but none of them helpful or even, mostly, sane.

  One week on from our corpse discovery and we are not one inch further forward. The enquiry, given the macho title of Operation Blade, is already limping.

  Jackson calls a Case Review meeting. These things do happen, of course. They happen in long, complex enquiries when the mass of data becomes alm
ost overwhelming and everyone benefits from a deep breath and a fresh perspective. But one week into a murder investigation? With a single victim and no great torrents of data?

  This is early for a Case Review, very early, and Bleddyn Jones prepares for it like some kind of angry bluebottle. Buzzy, demanding, repetitious.

  Obedient to that angry buzz, we all do extra work. Re-examine interviews, check lists, compile data, fill blanks.

  Me, I don’t mind. I like the activity. I have a photo of Gaynor Charteris’s oozing skull as my screensaver and a six inch by ten inch shot of her spear-stabbed torso at eyeline above my desk. I put in long hours and I love each one.

  The Case Review meeting is in Jackson’s office.

  Jackson and Jones are both there, of course. So am I, also Deryn Powell, the guy who’s been leading the forensics, and Sian Ryder, our indexer.

  Jackson kicks out his legs. Says, ‘So Bleddyn, why don’t you tell me what you’ve all been up to?’

  Jones tells him, via a Powerpoint presentation, no less.

  Maps with different coloured dots. Charts that assemble our not-very-useful forensic data into not-very-useful patterns. A team list with tasks and responsibilities. At one point, he’s talking about our house-to-house work and I think I was probably meant to chirp up with some interesting observations, but although he stared at me hard and arranged his moustache and beard into ever-less-pleasing configurations as he did so, I didn’t feel like chirping, so just stayed silent.

  He ended up doing the local summary bit instead of me, then said, ‘Is that right, Fiona?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ in a way that was intended to be positive, supportive and emphatic. His eyes glittered dangerously for a second, then moved off.

  I think: it’s a prison officer beard. That’s what it is. If you imagine your worst sort of prison officer, all keys and rules and punishments, you’d garnish that nightmare with a beard like Jones’s. Prickly and strangely black, as though dyed.

  We run for an hour. I mean: Jones does. That’s how long his Powerpoint thing lasts. Except for clarifying little points of fact, Jackson says nothing. His face is unreadable. A north-facing cliff that glimpses sunlight only during the winter solstice.