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

by Harry Bingham

  I don’t quite know how I feel on encountering this news. On the one hand, I didn’t kill Oakeshott: his murderer did. On the other hand, I was among the very last people on earth to see him and I deliberately frightened and upset him. My intrusion was, presumably, connected to his death. I deliberately chose to destabilise a wall, not knowing that a man would be killed by its collapse.

  Those things weigh on a person, even me.

  Jones dobs me in, of course. Picks up the phone to his Oxfordshire counterpart, Stuart Carr, and identifies their mystery woman.

  Carr’s sort of pleased, because it’s resolved his major lead, but sort of annoyed, because his nice little murder now dangles from the coat-tails of someone else’s enquiry.

  Carr asks us to send him whatever we’ve got. Asks to see us.

  So off we go. In Jones’s car, a BMW 1 Series. Not the newest model, but scrupulously clean, inside and out. The damn thing, in true Jonesian style, is funereal black and glossy.

  Miles and minutes pass us by.

  I notice how, viewed from the motorway, the countryside always looks the same. Pressed into some universal shape by this frame of tarmac and concrete.

  I say, ‘Funny how everything looks the same when you’re on a motorway.’

  Jones doesn’t respond to that interesting observation. Instead he says, ‘It’s not the first time. I know that. I looked in your file.’

  I don’t answer. Look away, rolling my eyes.

  No, it’s not the first time I’ve troubled my superiors. But it’s also not the first time I’ve worked undercover and the last time I did that, I did so for nigh on eight months, in a highly perilous situation and ended up forcing a successful – or almost successful – conclusion to the whole adventure. If Jones wants to play file-wars with me, he’s welcome.

  We drive on in silence.

  The miles and minutes go on passing, but they go more slowly now. Heaving their way past in a tense, embarrassed silence.

  Past Oxford to Kidlington. An unlovely suburb that houses the Thames Valley Police HQ.

  Carr’s office.

  Bland, cheap, unmodern.

  Carr himself: one of these fifty-something DIs who’ll never, for some reason, make it higher up the ladder. It’s often a matter of choice as much as competence. Some detectives just like the chance to get their boots dirty.

  He listens to our audio recording of last night. Listens to my entrance. My glass-smashing.

  Chuckles.

  ‘That’s old school, that is.’

  At the bit where I yell ‘ow!’, he stops the recording. ‘He did hurt you, did he?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, I was being arsey with him.’

  Jones says, ‘It was unprofessional behaviour. I’ve spoken with her about it already.’

  Carr says, and his gaze is on me, cutting out Jones altogether, ‘When you went in there. Last night. Did you have any reason to think your intervention would place Oakeshott at risk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he was a key witness, was he? I mean, potentially?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Carr looks at me a little longer. Then shrugs. Restarts the tape.

  We hear the woody thump of Oakeshott’s head hitting his desk. Carr says nothing. The chuckle is still there in his eyes, but something more serious too.

  We listen to the end.

  Carr asks, ‘You believe him?’

  Believe, that is, that he hadn’t killed Charteris. That he had done nothing illegal.

  ‘Yes. He was mixed up in something, but not that.’

  ‘So, whoever killed your Charteris woman killed Oakeshott. Maybe killed him for something he was about to disclose.’

  Probably yes, is the upshot of the discussion that follows.

  Carr – white hair, glasses, something a bit forward-leaning, a bit greyhoundy in his manner – takes a new pencil from a plastic holder and drums on the desk with it. Holds it up, ceremoniously. Displaying it to us. Then snaps it. Drops the pieces in a mug decorated with a child’s handprint. Puts the mug back on a shelf.

  ‘My good luck ritual,’ he says. ‘Always do it in cases of murder. Happened by accident the first time, then . . .’

  I stare at the mug, horrified. There are six pencils in it.

  I say, faintly, ‘How long have you . . .?’

  ‘Eighteen years ago the first one.’

  God save me from policing in Oxford, I think. And I’d thought Cardiff was bad.

  As I’m thinking this, the grown-ups are putting their Serious Masculine Faces on. I can’t match those faces for seriousness or masculinity, so I just smile becomingly.

  Carr points at me and says, ‘I might need to keep a hold of this one, if you can spare her.’

  Jones: ‘Far as I’m concerned, you can have her on a ninety-nine-year lease.’

  ‘And we’ll need to kick this upstairs, of course,’ Carr says, referring to the audio recording.

  Jones mutters something, but whatever he says is too boring for my brain to process, so instead the syllables get shredded and recycled and will turn up again as an interesting remark about waste collection or the best ways to organise desk-stationery.

  Jones goes. I stay. Carr talks to his boss. When he returns, he says, ‘Grieving widow time. Prepare to make nice.’

  Oxford.

  A row of brick houses, rattly Victorian things. Front gardens with bulbs and magnolias, bicycles and bins.

  The grieving widow – Lydia – is forty-ish. Slim. Shortish dark hair. Black trousers. A pretty floral tunic thing, roses on black, notched at the front. It’s the kind of top you might see on a much younger woman, but which looks good on her. Cool, even. All that, and a cardigan that doesn’t button or tie, just hangs and swings in a cooler way than it would ever hang or swing on me. The woman got dressed this morning not knowing that her husband was floating face down in a canal. Would she have dressed less cool if she had known? Or do you just wear the same clothes as you always wear? Finding that the weirdest thing about sudden bereavement is that the whole world goes on, much as it would if you hadn’t lost your beloved.

  Lydia Oakeshott’s home backs on to a canal. We sit at the end of the kitchen, looking through some french doors to where a weeping willow bends its fronds over the petrol-grey waters. An old rope-swing hangs motionless. It reminds me, for no reason, of an uncompleted suicide.

  In the living room, the couple’s two kids – a boy and a girl, six and eight – sit with a grandmother and a family liaison officer, supplied by Carr’s force. I recognise the kids, and Lydia of course, from the restaurant in Bath. If circumstances were different, I suppose they might even recognise me.

  The FLO flurries around with coffee. Knows where the biscuit tin is and puts it out.

  Early in my career I was offered training in family liaison. Female officer: good with tea and sympathy. That was the logic. Then my colleagues got to know me better and the offer was never repeated.

  Carr says, ‘Mrs Oakeshott. We’ve got information. New to me personally, and new to you too. That mystery woman. Last night’s intruder.’

  He stops. Some muscle in his jaw moves in a way that indicates, I think, he wants me to take the stage.

  I do so.

  ‘Mrs Oakeshott. I was that woman. I’m a police officer, a detective, in the South Wales force. We were pursuing an active investigation over in Cardiff and we believed that your husband was withholding some key information. I entered his room—’

  Lydia Oakeshott hardly hears me.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You broke his glasses?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There’s a movement in the woman’s face which seems almost relieved.

  ‘You weren’t . . . I mean, you and he hadn’t . . .’

  ‘We had never met before. There was no sort of relationship, no sexual relationship, involved.’

  She puts her hand to her face. Pushes back hair which hadn’t been in the way. Silver brace
lets rattle at her wrist. Different shades and expressions of grief compete for houseroom.

  I think: all those Emma-Felicity-Venetia-Charlottes, their long hair and dewy eagerness. Of course there were infidelities, perhaps many of them. It’s one of the things we neglect about grief: its unyielding complexity. A puzzle that never simplifies no matter how often, how obsessively, you turn it.

  I continue, ‘Our investigation is still at an early stage. But at this point, we do think that your husband was withholding information. We don’t think that he was involved in anything illegal, or not significantly illegal anyway. And we are not aware of any outside sexual relationship, or certainly nothing linked to our case.’

  That last comment elicits a short, sharp toss of the head, but nothing more.

  Carr, speaking carefully, says, ‘In cases like this, we always institute an internal investigation. We will keep you closely in touch with the—’

  ‘You were doing your job, yes? You broke some – some glasses.’

  Shrugs. A like-I-give-a-damn shrug.

  Lydia Oakeshott is so impeccably middle-class, she can’t even bring herself to insert the word ‘fucking’ where it naturally belongs.

  I say, ‘Mrs Oakeshott, we suspect that your husband’s death was linked to whatever it was he was withholding. Whatever secret he kept. If you can help in any way . . .’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. I mean . . .’ She wonders whether to talk about those infidelities. Realises she can’t. Moves on. ‘Nothing. He had this stupid Arthur obsession, but . . .’

  Her braceleted hand waves all that nonsense away. Away from the table. Away through the french doors. Down the slope of that tidy-lawned garden to the rope and the swing and the weeping willow and that dark unmoving water.

  With a half-smile, I sweep the nonsense all the way back again.

  ‘Ma’am. Sorry. Believe me, we know how hard this is. But our Cardiff investigation centres on the murder of another historian. An archaeologist. Someone who also had an interest in Arthur. Someone who may well have died as a result of that interest.’

  She stares at me. Doesn’t know how to respond.

  From next door, there’s a sudden wail from one of the children, the boy, I think. The wail summons the mother’s attention back from wherever it is. I’m struggling to reach her.

  I say, ‘Mrs Oakeshott, we’ll leave you as soon as we can. Just – do you have the names of others who shared your husband’s interest? We think there was some quite close circle of friends and associates—’

  ‘Oh God, no. He was all secretive about that stuff. His Round Table, he called it.’

  Her old annoyances encounter the rocks of her grief, their unfamiliar upthrust. For the first time since we’ve been here, there’s a quick wash of tears. Salt drops glinting in a blue, marine air.

  We ask what we need to ask. Leave as soon as we can.

  The widow’s story is this.

  Oakeshott came straight home last night. He was perturbed, clearly, after my intrusion into his chambered life. He snatched a quick supper. Helped bath the kids, but inattentively, distracted, unlike his usual self. Then raced out again, ‘with his stupid Round Table phone. He never used his regular mobile for those calls.’

  He left the house about half past eight. When he wasn’t back at midnight, and hadn’t called or texted, Lydia Oakeshott called the police, somewhat embarrassed, but anxious all the same. Her call wasn’t treated with any great seriousness: in the absence of child protection concerns or the like, no police force will treat someone as missing without a gap of at least twenty-four hours.

  ‘But,’ the widow told us, ‘I just had this awful feeling. He wasn’t the way he normally was. I just thought . . . I just thought . . .’

  What she thought, I don’t know, but her instinct was horribly right. The corpse was found not long after dawn by a man cycling down the canal towpath.

  Lydia: ‘Oh yes, he used to walk there all the time. If he had calls to make, he’d often go outside. Walk and talk. He had a big fresh air thing.’

  If we could trace those calls we’d quite likely be able to close the case fairly speedily, but there’s no trace of the phone, no record of its number.

  Email the same.

  We get on to Google immediately, of course. It took one long and tedious weekend last time but, given the newly accelerated circumstances, we manage to get access to Oakeshott’s MyrddinEmrys@gmail.com data by eight o’clock that evening.

  And—

  Nothing.

  Everything deleted. Not sitting in the deleted folder, but deleted-deleted.

  Not just that, but when I send test emails to Uthyr@gmail.com, Medraut@gmail.com, and the rest of that crew, the emails bounce.

  We talk to someone at Google about it. He sounds like a real human being – albeit a Californian one whose hair is probably full of sunshine and organic hair product. But he confirms that, real sorry, the data has actually gone.

  Gone as in gone-gone.

  Gone as in irrecoverable.

  John Oakeshott was many things. A man, a husband, a father, an adulterer, a historian, an Arthurian obsessive. But he was also, crucially, our most promising lead on the Gaynor Charteris case and, so far, that lead is as dead as the man who was carrying it.

  Two corpses. No leads.

  And a mystery that darkens with every turn.

  21

  So we work.

  Forensics, of course, though that muddy and well-travelled canal path is hardly promising.

  Data analysis. Phone calls and car movements and all that.

  And interviews. A million of them.

  Our interviews take in all the medievalists in the Oxford history faculty. Where were you on the night of the 11/12 April? Were you engaged in secret phone and email communication with John Philip Oakeshott? Or with Gaynor Charteris, lately of Dinas Powys in the county of South Glamorgan?

  We ask the right questions in the right way.

  Push hard, get nowhere.

  It’s not even that we get no answers. We don’t even get a frisson of concealment, that sense of fear.

  On the contrary. We find the opposite. Tweedy dons, earnest graduates, all shocked by what happened. Anxious to help. Offering advice and information that is anywhere from hopelessly irrelevant to endearingly barmy.

  We go through Oakeshott’s known professional contacts. Oxford graduate students working in the same field. We look at his personal address book, his work emails, his conferences, everything.

  Do that, and get nowhere.

  Yes, we find evidence of Oakeshott’s infidelities. The lovely Felicity – she of the extravagant polo neck and complicated jewellery – was one such. But she, winsomely tear-stained and repentant, knew nothing to help us. From Oakeshott’s point of view, she was an available shag, nothing more.

  Jones doesn’t want me in Cardiff and Carr does want me in Oxford, so I’m part of that whole busy whirl. Interviewing. Note-taking. Report-writing. Briefings. Reviews.

  The Kidlington HQ has a block that provides accommodation for visiting staff. The place is clean enough, but still horrible, so I call an old friend of mine from Cambridge – a Junior Research Fellow in philosophy at Christchurch College. She, Rosemary, offers me a berth on her floor, and I spend my days working up at Kidlington or co-interviewing with Carr’s team. Spend my evenings snuggled up on Rosemary’s sofa, stockinged feet buried amongst her abundant cushions. We sit talking till late.

  After she’s gone to bed, I generally pass a pleasant hour or so checking out those Arthurian message boards.

  My press release and my stirring has done the trick.

  People have noticed that the seal box could be the first ever true Arthurian artefact. That stone from Camlan, or nearby, seems to confirm it. The thefts from Bangor and Saint Tydecho’s suggest that there’s more to come and there’s intense speculation as to what that might be.

  And what is that thing?

  I don’t yet know. I need to f
ind out.

  I talk endlessly with Katie, speculating about the case. Talking about blacksmithery and jewellery and what life was like back then. The Romans gone, the Saxons coming. Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.

  Katie comes over to Oxford a couple of times too. Not for work reasons, or not really. We’ve become friends, I think. That friendship started somewhere on the road up to Bangor and has slowly settled in to place thereafter. And it’s true, certainly, that Katie’s loss of her Ph.D. leaves her at a loose end, and this case is the most interesting thing to fill it. But also – we like each other. We enjoy our time spent together. It’s a good feeling.

  At one point, I have to go back to Cardiff to receive my Formal Written Warning from Bleddyn Jones and some pretty blonde bob in Human Resources. And when that happy ritual is complete, I head home for some fresh clothes and find, waiting on my doormat, some padded envelopes with my eBay treasure.

  My Roman glass. A silver bell. Some beads of Whitby jet.

  When I go back to Oxford, to interview more academics or sit across a table as Oakeshott’s grieving students explain to me how utterly surprising and mysterious and inexplicable his death was, I keep one hand in my pocket, where I keep my two dozen beads of Romano–Celtic jet.

  Roll those beads round and round, little emissaries from a distant age, and I remember that nothing is for ever.

  King Arthur was not for ever.

  His defeat of the Saxons was not for ever.

  Inspector Jones of the Irritating Beard: he too is not for ever.

  When Katie tells me that she’s arranged for the dig at Dinas Powys to be re-opened, just for a week or two, just so the initial exploratory project can be completed as planned, I give her six of my Whitby beads. She will scatter them into the trench and cover them over with soil. When they are ‘found’, they will be logged, analysed and uploaded to the project website.