It’s nine in the morning at some sunny Californian Googleplex, five o’clock in a gloomy Cardiff. Outside our windows, a sudden fierce scatter of sleet.
I say, ‘Anything?’
Jones shakes his head. ‘I’m pushing.’
I grimace.
Jones has his keyboard pushed away. A fierce black doodle is taking shape on his notepad. I observe this, then observe Jones observing me. Two detectives reading each other for clues.
‘If anything comes in . . .’ I say.
He doesn’t say yes, but he nods.
I return to my desk. Do nothing much. Look at pictures of Charteris, mostly. Her headless body, her bodiless head.
Jones turns up eight minutes before seven. Dark grey suit. That weirdly black hair and beard.
‘Still here?’ he says.
I blink, which is one eyelid movement more than the question warrants.
He says, ‘I got a call from California. They’ve given us a password. We’re in.’
He shows me the password.
MynyddBaddon960.
Jones scrutinises my face, seeing if it means anything to me.
It does.
I say, ‘It’s a reference to Arthur’s decisive battle, Mount Badon. That “960” isn’t a date, it’s the number of men he killed.’
‘He killed nine hundred and sixty men?’
I’ve got a couple of my Arthur books in my bag. Get one of them – Nennius’s Historia Brittonum – and pass it over.
‘This is Nennius, one of the earliest historians to mention Arthur. Chapter fifty-six is the bit you want.’
Jones doesn’t read the text out loud, but I know it well already.
At that time, the Saxons grew strong by virtue of their large number and increased in power in Britain . . . Then Arthur along with the kings of Britain fought against them in those days, but Arthur himself was the commander-in-chief. His first battle was at the mouth of the river which is called Glein. His second, third, fourth, and fifth battles were above another river which is called Dubglas and is in the region of Linnuis. The sixth battle was above the river which is called Bassas. The seventh battle was in the forest of Celidon, that is Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth battle was at the fortress of Guinnion, in which Arthur carried the image of holy Mary ever virgin on his shoulders; and the pagans were put to flight on that day. And through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the power of the blessed Virgin Mary his mother there was great slaughter among them. The ninth battle was waged in the City of the Legion. The tenth battle was waged on the banks of a river which is called Tribruit. The eleventh battle was fought on the mountain which is called Agnet. The twelfth battle was on Mount Badon in which there fell in one day nine hundred and sixty men from one charge by Arthur; and no one struck them down except Arthur himself, and in all the wars he emerged as victor.
Jones looks perplexed.
‘This is real, is it?’
‘It’s a real history book, yes.’
‘And this battle, Mount Badon? That was real?’
I shrug. I’m a detective, not a time traveller. I say, ‘Historians on both sides mention the battle, including some who were writing within living memory. And there’s archaeological evidence that something halted the Saxon invasion at around this time. So a decisive battle of this kind? Well, yes, it certainly looks likely.’
Jones takes my pad and writes. ‘Mount Badon. 960 men. Major battle.’ Tears the sheet off and pockets it.
One of those things that police officers do for no reason I can possibly fathom. Like if you take a note of something, you’ve trapped it. Clapped handcuffs over an idea.
He says, ‘He killed nine hundred and sixty men? With what? A machine gun?’
I don’t reply.
We go to Jones’s office. Go to Gmail. Enter Charteris’s address and password. There’s a momentary pause, then – emails. Hundreds of them. A busy, well-populated account.
We call out for pizza.
Work.
16
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Quondam futurusque
Date: 3 January 2015
Phew, what a night that was – I’m getting too old! And look, just to put in writing what I said (more than a bit tipsily) then: YES. I think we should go for it. From my point of view, it’s only about actually getting proper attention back to the amazing work we all do. I’ve been working in this field for thirty years now and the hard fact is that funding is actually decreasing. (Yes, yes, I know: should have been a particle physicist.) I suppose I think of it like those doctors using defibrillators: a short sharp shock to get things moving again. A PR stunt, really.
Anyway. Yes. I’m in.
Gosh. I think I’m still hung over!
Gwen xxx
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Quondam futurusque
Date: 6 May 2015
M, just wanted to say that I was in Oxford today for a lecture and dropped in on Uthyr afterwards. Yvain + Medraut were there too – already a bit pissed, I think, even though I only arrived about sixish. I didn’t stay long – back home now – but just thought I should say, Medraut seemed really dark. Maybe it’s just one of his phases – with a past like his, it’s hardly surprising! – but I thought you should know. I sort of rely on you to keep this whole thing on track. Someone’s got to.
Gwen xxx
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Quondam futurusque
Date: 18 June 2015
M??? I think I want to say that this has all gone too far. I thought at first it was a fun idea to play with. Something halfway between a prank and a real exercise in scholarship. And now? I just don’t like any part of this. Medraut’s obsession with getting the ‘right gold’ is taking us into dangerous areas. I mean, if he wants gold, why not just get some gold? Personally, I feel like I want to stop this whole thing.
Oh God! I was so excited when we started and already it feels like the worst mistake of my life.
Gwen xxx
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: QF and all that
Date: 11 October 2015
Oh gosh, M – I feel relieved. I’m sitting here, feet up, watching a late-night weepie, and you know I think I feel OK for the first time since our whole idea got serious. With hindsight, the whole thing was a terrible idea and I don’t quite know how we all got seduced into it. But at least we abandoned ship at the right time . . . or I think we did.
So, anyway, I just wanted to send you an extra big hug to say thanks for everything. Will you come over at Christmas maybe? We could tramp around my favourite fort and talk about what might have been.
Thanks again.
Gwen xoxoxox
It’s midnight. We’ve printed and read 721 emails. We’ve been into Charteris’s inbox, her sent mail, and her deleted folder.
The vast majority of those emails are ordinary nothings. Chit chat with Katie. Sorting little work niggles. Making arrangements with her choir-buddies.
But that still leaves about three dozen emails that seem interesting. Those emails are mostly to or from MyrddinEmrys – Merlin Ambrosius, the wise man or wizard of Arthurian myth. Those emails have only one subject header: ‘Quondam Futurusque’.
Early on in the evening, Jones’s pizza-holding hand tapped the phrase.
‘Latin.’
‘Yes.’
He looked a question.
I said, ‘It refers to the supposed inscription on Arthur’s tomb.’ Explained that the inscription was said to read Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus. In English: ‘Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.’
‘A once and future king? What’s that? Some kind of riddle?’
‘Not exactly. Legend has it that King Arthur never really died. He lies below ground but will return again i
f and when Britain is in peril. The king-protector of these islands.’
‘So why didn’t he come back to fight Hitler then?’
Jones smirked for an audience that wasn’t there, wasn’t in this room. An audience that he left behind in Bridgend.
And I remember thinking: well, maybe he did.
Maybe, somehow, that spirit of Arthur returned to win the Battle of Britain, to stumble victorious from the mud and slaughter of the First World War. Perhaps Arthur was on the field at Waterloo, swayed on Victory’s quarterdeck through the smokes of Trafalgar, manned the guns at Blenheim, sailed with Raleigh against the Spanish Armada.
If you’re dealing with myth, you’re dealing with myth, and who knows how those things work?
We put the Quondam Futurusque emails in a chain, linked by date.
It seems clear enough that a group of like-minded people conceived some secret project. Secret, illicit, some whiff of danger.
There was initial excitement, then a darkening. A gathering sense of risk or failure. Then the whole thing was abandoned – or at least, Gaynor Charteris thought it was.
The group of conspirators, if that’s what they were, included:
Gwenhwyfar: Guinevere/Gaynor Charteris.
MyrddinEmrys: Merlin Ambrosius, the wise man or wizard of myth.
Medraut: Mordred, Arthur’s illegitimate son.
Yvain: a knight of no particular interest, as far as I know.
Gwalchmei: ditto.
Uthyr: ditto.
To judge from the tone of her emails, Charteris herself never intended any serious harm from the scheme. Myrddin seems to have been central to the plot, at least from Charteris’s perspective. If there was a ringleader of the ‘dark side’, then Medraut was probably that person. We don’t know who the ‘Medraut and co.’ signifies.
We don’t know what the conspiracy was, except that gold was somehow involved.
The pizza is now stone cold and greasy, but I nibble at it anyway. Jones re-reads the emails. His lips don’t move as he reads, but he has this habit of moving his thumb down the page, paragraph by paragraph, as though pinning the things down, preventing flight.
‘There’s not enough here,’ he says.
‘No.’
‘For a search warrant, I mean.’
‘I know.’
Google will respect a British search warrant, but no British court would give us a warrant for reading the innocent emails of third-parties not clearly connected with any crime.
So we can’t persuade Google to show us the Medraut/Myrddin/Yvain emails.
So what we have, for now, is a tantalising dead end.
I say, mouth full of pizza, ‘We arrange a meeting.’
‘What?’
I take Jones’s keyboard with a flourish. A conjuror about to perform a brand new trick.
Get up a fresh Gmail page.
Compose a new message.
To: [email protected].
From: [email protected]
Date: 5 April
Subject: Rex quondam, rexque futurus.’
Can we meet? Gwenhwyfar.
I don’t hit send.
Let Jones lean over me, over the computer, stroking his beard and thinking.
Lose the beard, lose the beard, lose the beard, I think, trying to pummel the message into him by mind-power alone.
‘Why do you have a Queen Guinevere Gmail account?’
‘It’s one I made earlier,’ I say.
Lose the beard.
‘It can’t hurt can it?’
He reaches over my shoulder. Clicks send.
‘Why do you have a Guinevere Gmail account?’ The second time he’s asked.
A truthful answer would be: ‘I used that name to circulate our antiquities-themed press release to about ten thousand Arthur fanatics, and chose not to mention that to you.’
But it’s gone midnight and the rules say that you don’t have to answer annoying questions after midnight. I yawn to remind him.
We’re alone in a room with an empty pizza box and 721 emails.
17
A week later.
The Bear Hotel and Restaurant, Bath.
I’m alone. Half-past midday. On the table in front of me, I have a lunch menu and a glass of fizzy water. Those things, plus a small brown teddy bear and a plastic crown.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Rex quondam, rexque futurus.
Date: 5 April, 2016
Where? When?
Here and now, the answer to those questions. We’ve got audio recording on the table. Video from two angles. Outside on the street, there are some guys repainting a green telecoms unit. A man changing a tyre. In a nearby cafe, a couple of women chatting over cappuccinos. They’re our people, all of them. The man changing his tyre will find that his spare tyre has gone flat. Will have to call for help. Will be able to stay out there for two hours if need be.
Jones – positioned up the road in a van stuffed with electronics – calls me.
‘All units in place,’ he says. ‘Stand by for contact.’
‘“Stand by for contact?” This isn’t Afghanistan, you know.’
‘Fiona – just. Just be ready, OK.’
‘I was ready. I’m actually less ready now because you keep talking like we’re expecting an attack of the Taliban.’
A waiter approaches. I wave him forward.
With Jones listening, I say, ‘I’ll have the pan-fried chicken livers, please. Then the fillet steak.’
Jones says, ‘Don’t go crazy, Fiona. That steak’s the most expensive thing on the menu.’
I say, ‘No, not unless you get the Béarnaise sauce as well.’ To the waiter, I say, ‘And I’ll have the Béarnaise sauce as well, please.’
Jones says, ‘Fiona!’ which isn’t either a question or an order.
‘I’m getting in role, sir. I just think Guinevere would have the steak.’
We ring off.
Nothing happens.
A waiter comes with my chicken livers. Pan-fried, because as far as I know there is no other way to fry the things.
I eat some of them. They’re nice. Garlicky, and lemony, and fatty, and yum.
The waiter clears my plate.
The restaurant is reasonably busy now. A bit of business custom. Some men in grey suits. A woman in a cream dress talking to a salesman type in a silvery-lilac tie. A family birthday party. A group of women, two of them with babies in prams. A few men at the bar.
A waiter brings my steak.
I don’t think I’ve ever had Béarnaise before, but it’s nice. The steak is a bit much, though, after the chicken livers, so I only peck at it. Give the side salad most of my attention. Finish my water.
The family birthday party breaks out into Happy Birthdays and the dad hops around taking photos.
One forty-five. No Myrddin.
I order peppermint tea, because I can’t face pudding, not even to annoy Bleddyn Jones.
Make the tea and bill payment last until two fifteen.
Then Jones calls.
‘OK, let’s wrap this up.’
I go. I keep the teddy bear but leave the plastic crown as part of the waiter’s tip. Walk half a mile in towards the centre of Bath, before an unmarked white van pulls up beside me.
I yank at the back door and climb inside.
‘How did we do?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, OK.’
He shoves some print-outs at me. Stills taken from the restaurant video feeds.
The business guys. The cream dress woman. The birthday party. The barman’s buddies. The various other people who came and went while I was there.
Most of the print-outs have vehicle plates scribbled on them. Some have names as well. Other names will follow shortly.
The family birthday party isn’t yet tagged with either vehicle registration or name.
I say, ‘This guy. The dad. He kept taking photos. I was
definitely in some of them.’
Jones nods. ‘They arrived on foot. Then took a taxi to the station.’
Which is strange in itself. Birthday parties of that kind are normally taken round the corner from home, or at least in the same town. And trains are expensive: a family like that would normally travel by car.
Jones makes a call. Aidan Jenkins, the guy who’d been busy with his thwarted tyre change.
‘Aidan, any update?’
‘Yep, I’ve got them in sight. They’re buying tickets. Time on the clock is two forty-eight. Left-hand window. The person making the sale is a blonde thirty- or forty-something woman, shoulder-length hair. You want me to follow onto the train?’
‘How did they pay for the tickets?’
‘Card.’
‘OK, just watch them onto a train. That’ll do.’
He rings off.
‘You’re paying for that damn steak. I won’t authorise it.’
I don’t argue.
We wait until Aidan Jenkins calls back. ‘Train to Reading and London. They’re on it.’
We drive to the station.
Flash warrant cards at the ticket office. Jones comes over all detective inspectory. Talks about, ‘Pursuing a suspect on a current murder enquiry.’
The blonde woman lets us look at her payments screen. The father bought tickets to Oxford, with a change at Reading. We take a print-off of the card receipt.
Jones calls the card numbers through to Cardiff. Holds the line. Scratches his beard.
Then, ‘Yeah, OK, give me that again.’
Writes: ‘J. P. Oakeshott. John Phillip. 15 Halifax Road, Oxford.’
‘OK. Get everything else you can. Bio. Photo. Facebook. Phone number. All that.’
But I’m half a step ahead of him. Use my phone to search, ‘John Oakeshott Oxford’.
The first result: an Oxford University web page. John Oakeshott, with photo – the guy in the restaurant.
Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College. Area of interest: Late antiquity and early medieval history.
Bingo.
18
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 12
