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

by Harry Bingham

  I get none of those things, but my fingers do change colour. My police eye watches the clock on the kitchen wall. Counts one minute. Two minutes. Three.

  The voice tells me it’s OK to remove the hands from the water. So I do. Turn off the tap, go upstairs. Walk carefully, because I can’t feel or sense my legs. Have to actually watch my feet onto each stair because I can’t trust that they’ll find their own way there.

  Into Katie’s room. Put the drinks down without spilling them.

  I think I must look wooden. Almost puppety. Legs like poles of hollow pine. Joints of knotted elastic.

  I sit down on the bed.

  I assume Katie will say something about my awkwardness, but she’s too pre-occupied with her own departing gusts of feeling to notice anything awry in me.

  She wipes her face.

  ‘It’s a bit of a fucker,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  And as she speaks and as I answer – pop! It all returns. Feeling, ordinary sound, everything. The whole world back again, just as it was, except that my fingertips can now feel the afterburn of that scald.

  I don’t say anything. Don’t try to figure any of this out. Just listen to Katie as she continues.

  ‘Diagnosis was six weeks ago. My age should count in my favour, but so far . . .’

  She doesn’t finish the sentence but makes a downward-plunging motion with her hand.

  I nod.

  ‘And when Charteris died . . .’

  ‘It was another kick in the teeth. I mean, I really liked Gaynor and was sorry for her anyway . . .’

  ‘But you also needed her.’

  ‘Yes. It’s stupid, I know, but I made up my mind that I’d get my Ph.D. before I died. I’d give up on everything else but, fuck it, I’d at least achieve that one thing.’

  ‘Then Charteris dies. The project looks like it’s going to fail. Yes, in theory you’ve got the capacity to take it over, but you’re going to be losing mobility and a lot else, and you just can’t see yourself running the dig, monitoring your team, and writing a doctoral thesis.’

  Katie snorts.

  ‘Thank you, slave. You have an uncanny knack for pointing out quite how thickly enshitted I am.’

  Katie’s naturalness with me helps. So too does the glow in my fingertips. I say, ‘And Charteris knew? She knew about your diagnosis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The others?’

  ‘No. They knew something was up, but not what or how bad.’

  That brings me to the niggle that brought me here. The little puff of thought that blew all the way to murder.

  ‘Katie, did you ever talk about the issue with Charteris by email? Email, text, anything like that.’

  Katie nods. Says yes. Tells me they needed to plan how to manage the dig if Katie was progressively more disabled.

  I say, ‘But not on her Open University email address. Not on her BT one.’

  As far as we know, Charteris had just those two email addresses. A work one, and a home one.

  Katie says, ‘She had a Gmail address as well. She wasn’t very tech-savvy. Liked to curl up in the evening with her tablet and chat online . . .’

  She continues, but I interrupt.

  We need that data and need it soon. I ask for the email address.

  Katie laughs. ‘I can’t pronounce it, but I can spell it.’

  Gwenhwyfar@gmail.com.

  Gwenhwyfar: the Welsh spelling of Guinevere. Arthur’s wife.

  There are a few possible answers to that. A few questions, rather. But what I actually ask is this: ‘Katie, how much do you know about ancient metalwork?’

  ‘Metalwork?’

  ‘Jewellery, goldsmithing, blacksmithing. That kind of thing.’

  She tells me what she knows, and what she knows is plenty.

  13

  Leave Katie’s house. Drive up past the cemetery, to the green languor of Roath Park, the troubled turpentine of its lake.

  I park there, watching the waves.

  That moment in Katie’s kitchen.

  Fingers clasped around a boiling kettle, face hanging over the spout. The world clouding with steam and me so removed from it that it took real mental effort to figure out what was happening.

  I think, it is happening again. My illness is coming back. I will never feel safe. I will never sleep again.

  My illness.

  It’s not something I speak about much, but the simple facts are these. When I was fifteen, I became mentally unwell. Spent two years, on and off, in mental hospitals. My condition was diagnosed as Cotard’s Syndrome: a state in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead.

  For two years, in the most literal way possible, I thought I was dead. A walking corpse.

  I did, eventually, recover. Make friends, go to college, get a job, build a life. But I’ve never felt secure. Never felt that the illness was gone, never to return.

  And now?

  It is happening again. My illness is coming back.

  I am so scared I almost don’t know how to move.

  After a while, I don’t know how long, I call Bleddyn Jones. Tell him about Charteris’s third email address.

  ‘She had a secret address?’

  ‘No, not secret. Just something she only used for particular times and particular people.’

  I give him the name, Gwenhwyfar.

  ‘What’s that? In English, that would be Jennifer, right? Do we have any Jennifers in connection with the case?’

  ‘Sir, I don’t think she had any Jennifers in mind.’

  Tell him about Gwenhwyfar/Guinevere.

  ‘Ah.’ He doesn’t like that answer. Changes tack. ‘Gmail, you said?’

  Yes.

  And Google holds its data overseas, where a regular British search warrant has no legal force. But there are processes which unlock even Google’s vaults and Jones tells me, a bit gruffly, that he’ll deal with them. His chore, his headache.

  I hang up.

  Drive, slowly, up the hill to my parents’ house.

  My parents.

  My booming pa, my changeless ma, my two younger sisters.

  Today, I’m in luck. I score my mother (expected), one out of two sisters (Kay, the older one, not usually around these days), and my father (a rarity on these Friday evenings).

  Dad does his usual bear-huggy crush. His holding me at arms-length thing, that inspection.

  My mam rushes out to welcome me, then races around the kitchen, laying out everything that is edible and tempting.

  Plates, food, chatter.

  Kay appears.

  Hug. Kiss. Genuine affection.

  That exchange of glances between grown-up sisters that says, ‘Parents, huh?’ and answers, ‘Yeah, parents!’

  There’s a bottle of brown beer for my pa, who doesn’t actually drink much these days. Water for the rest of us, water that’s had a long squeeze of lemon juice because – this is Kay’s latest thing – the lemon juice helps you lose weight, cleanse your system, boost immunity, remove impurities, eliminate caffeine, and does something with potassium, Kay isn’t sure what, but after hesitating between three major options (increase potassium, decrease potassium, or just balance the stuff), she opts for the third with a flourish of confidence.

  I say, ‘Your skin is looking really nice,’ and Mam starts telling me how long she’s been free of colds and flu.

  We eat. We drink. We finish. We wash up.

  Kay ghosts upstairs and comes back down in a vaguely metallic dress, dark blue and moody bronze-gold. Her lemon-juiced good looks are now lipsticked, blushed, mascaraed and eye-lined to a point where they’re at or beyond weapons grade. A hemline rides high on her thigh. A clutch-bag, loaded, lies on a hallway chair.

  Kay has a lingering desire to spend a bit of time curled up between me and Mam on the sofa, but her huntress instincts prove too much, and her gold stilettos carry her, clicking, across the parquet to the front door and whatever waits for her beyond. A sweep of perfume, duskily
sexy, the only lingering trace.

  The house feels emptier without her.

  I spend half an hour with Mam in front of the telly. We watch enough of a period detective drama together that she’s happy. Then pop into the kitchen to make myself a peppermint tea, get waylaid by Dad, allow myself to be ushered through into his studio, his world.

  We talk. We chink around. Dad’s got a thing for lovespoons at the moment – ornate carved wooden spoons, a Welsh tradition. He tells me that he’s bought a six-foot lump of lime wood and is commissioning a giant lovespoon for Mam.

  It’s good patter, Dad’s, it always is, but his heart isn’t quite in it. Nor is mine.

  Without thinking about it, without premeditation, I ask, ‘Do you want to come for a drive?’

  That’s a strange question to ask at ten in the evening, but his response is delayed by a micro-second only. No more.

  ‘Yes, love, of course. I’ll just tell your mam.’

  He does.

  We leave. Take my car, not Dad’s. Head out of town. Hit the motorway. Turn west.

  Dad says nothing, but I feel the prick of his gaze on me. We talk about anything or nothing, but mostly we’re just aware of this thrum of road, the passing miles.

  We sweep past Bridgend. Past Neath and Swansea.

  It’s now gone eleven, and for the first time I see Dad kick his legs out, relax. There’s a chuckle rippling in him now, a secret entertainment. We get out beyond Carmarthen. Nothing much beyond us now but a few sheep-bitten fields and the wide blue Atlantic. We drive on through a dark and empty Haverfordwest. Take the lane that leads to Walwyn’s Castle and St Ishmaels, the last scrap of land before the ocean.

  This is the tip of infinity, the edge of oblivion.

  I park on a grassy verge. Turn the engine off.

  Still that tremble of pleasure from my father, whose old night-time adventures now lie largely in his past.

  He says, ‘You had a case here once, didn’t you, love? Back when you were starting out.’

  I tell him yes, sex trafficking, but add, ‘Brendan Rattigan. He was the guy behind all this.’ I gesture forward into the night.

  ‘Oh, I know that. It was in the papers, you know, love.’

  ‘And Brendan Rattigan was mates with people like Idris Prothero, David Marr-Phillips, Owain Owen, Galton Evans.’

  I list the men who were the primary targets of Operation April. Who escaped from us, from our enquiry.

  Dad shrugs. ‘Rich men . . .’ he murmurs. His implication being that in south Wales the club of the super-wealthy is small enough that they all know each other.

  ‘Yes, but they weren’t just friends, they were colleagues too. Were, are. The ones who are still alive and out of jail.’

  Dad doesn’t respond with words, but even his silence is a kind of response. I don’t think his merriment has altogether vanished, but his silence now has a watchfulness to it. An alertness.

  ‘You used to know them,’ I say. ‘That gang. Not just know them. You used to work with them.’

  Dad’s silence now is absolute. He doesn’t know if he’s sitting here at midnight with his daughter or with a detective. If he’s listening to a helpful disclosure or the prelude to a formal charge.

  I help him out. ‘My colleagues don’t know this. I haven’t told them and I won’t. I do have proof of your acquaintance. I don’t have proof, not courtroom proof anyway, of your working relationship.’

  And it’s true. It took a long time but I found a photo that showed my father at the races with another man. The photo of that other man showed only his arm, but that arm was distinctively clad in a blue Prince of Wales check. By working print by print through the archives of Chepstow Racecourse, I was able to find the owner of that arm: David Marr-Phillips. By working even harder, I was able to place Rossiter and Evans at the same racecourse on the same date. Eventually found enough overlap of dates and people to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this little group were using the races as a place to meet. Those meetings reached a peak in the mid-’80s.

  Around the time that Cardiff Bay was being redeveloped.

  Around the time that some already-rich men became even richer.

  Around the time that I was found – a penny dropped from a silver heaven – in the back of my father’s Jaguar.

  I was about two years old at the time. Mute. Didn’t speak my name, didn’t speak at all for a couple of years. Went untraced by the police and was formally adopted by this man, Tom Griffiths and his wife Kathleen. Technically speaking, they’re my adoptive parents, but they’re the only true parents I’ve ever had.

  My dad is still silent, so I add, ‘I’m not wearing a wire. I’m not recording anything.’

  And, as Dad probably knows, my relationship with him is such that any evidence I acquired in this way would be pretty much trashed in court. Too conflicted to be of any evidential weight.

  Dad says, and the chuckle is still just about there, ‘They’re bastards, that lot. Every last one of them.’

  I say, ‘Gina Jewell.’

  Killed in 1985. A road accident, or that’s what was believed at the time. That’s how the death was reported. But Jewell was also a redoubtable campaigner for the rights of local residents. A woman who threatened the profits of those selfsame property developers.

  A credible source, a man in the City Council Planning Department at the time, told me that my father arranged the killing.

  Dad says, ‘Gina Jewell.’

  I say, ‘As far as any of my colleagues are concerned, she died in a road accident.’

  Dad says, ‘Gina Jewell.’

  I wait.

  Let silence do what silence does.

  I can almost feel my dad deciding what to do with this unexpected line of enquiry. Considering his options.

  And eventually, after thinking them through, all he says is, ‘You didn’t bring me all this way just to ask about Gina Jewell.’

  ‘No.’

  In truth, I don’t quite know why I brought him. Company mostly, but also something I’ve noticed before. Dad opens up more when’s he’s a little excited by the setting. I came to him once – working undercover, employed by gangsters, braceleted with an audio device that recorded everything – and he told me more then, typing silently into a laptop, eyes sparkling with merriment, than he ever has done before or since.

  But if he doesn’t want to tell me more, then he doesn’t.

  I shrug slightly. Reach into the back of the car for my fleece. Change my pretty scallop-edged black-suede flats for a pair of thick walking boots. Get a torch from the glove box.

  Dad gets out. Stretches. Pulls on his jacket and zips up.

  ‘It’s fresh,’ he says, facing the wind. ‘You can smell the salt.’

  Can you? I never really know. But I twitch the torch at a field gate and we clamber over.

  Cropped grass and lichened limestone.

  Fields that slope down to the sea.

  A little cliff that I once rolled a man over. A lighthouse where I shot three men, killing one and wounding two.

  Happy days.

  But we’re not going to the lighthouse. Not going to the cliff.

  Up behind the lighthouse, there’s a stone sheepfold. We go there.

  Dad holds the torch while I root around at the back. I shift some stones around, wondering why I didn’t come when it was light. Then see the blue gleam of an old fertiliser sack and yank at the plastic till it comes free.

  Inside the plastic: a gun.

  I take the gun. Shove the fertiliser sack back where it was.

  The gun is a bit big for me, but it’ll do. A gun’s a gun.

  Dad peers at it. ‘That’s not the one . . .’

  ‘It’s not the one you gave me, no.’

  He opens his mouth to say, ‘I didn’t give you a gun.’

  The default denial. The automatic response of a man who has spent half his life avoiding police surveillance.

  But then – the wind, the night, this gun.
He’s in a deserted field at midnight, watching his daughter retrieve an illegal handgun from the place she stashed it.

  He waves his hand, implying that the denial is there if needed. His denial-hand is also his torch-hand, and the beam of light swings briefly up to a star-filled sky before returning to us. Anyone watching us from Alpha Centauri will, in a few years’ time, see that little flash. Wonder what it meant.

  ‘Do you have ammo?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  We start to walk back.

  ‘Are you in danger?’

  ‘No. I mean, I’ve got a case on at the moment and I don’t know how that’ll turn out. But no. Mostly, I just wanted a gun.’

  So I can sleep. Because the only time I’ve ever slept really well, I had a gun within one short arm movement of my bed. There’s no logic in that. I don’t need a gun. I live in a quiet suburb of a quiet city in one of the world’s quietest and safest countries and I have no need of this gun. But here I am, in the middle of the night, with an illegal handgun in my pocket and I feel almost safe for the first time since that moment in Katie’s kitchen.

  ‘You want to watch out for those things,’ says Dad primly. ‘They’re bad things, guns.’

  Says the man who was prosecuted twice for armed robbery, once for possession of a firearm with intent, and once each for kidnap and arson.

  I shake my head in the wind and night. Say nothing.

  Back at the car, I shove the gun in the glovebox. It’s two hours back to Cardiff and neither of us feels like climbing back into the Alfa Romeo’s lamplit cockpit just yet.

  I say, ‘Do you want to smoke?’

  Dad doesn’t smoke normally, but the wind and the stars call for something, so we sit on the verge and smoke. A tobacco-only roll-up for Dad. A rather more herbal version for me.

  Dad says, ‘Gina Jewell.’

  I look at him. Say nothing.

  He smokes. A glow of orange at the tip. Another tiny clue for those watchers from a distant star.

  He says, ‘She was killed, yes, and on my patch. But not by me or by any of my lads. That’s when everything started to fall apart. We had . . . we had different ways of operating.’ He laughs. ‘I was never ruthless enough. Too nice, me.’