Me, I tug the cut wood into a pile and start a fire, using a scrunched-up copy of the north Welsh Daily Post and a box of matches. Soon get a thin grey smoke and the fierce tremble of heat. Sweat happily in the chill sun.
We work hard. Work happily.
By five o’clock, we’ve done enough and, for five minutes or more, we rest. Lean up against the Land Rover. Drink tea from a thermos. Watch the fire.
Janice asks, ‘You’ll be staying tonight?’
‘If we can,’ I say.
She says yes. Says of course. Zooms off in the Land Rover, Tidy bounding along behind.
I walk back to the little farmhouse.
And on the way – boof! – it happens again.
It.
The dissociation. The emptying out.
One moment, I’m walking across this late spring field. The next moment – what?
Someone is walking across this late spring field. A person who, from the outside, to an ordinary observer, probably looks and sounds and – I expect – tastes, feels and smells like me.
But I’m not there. No one is.
Where there should be a bustling consciousness, all full of, I don’t know, a wood-smoked, sunny-eyed satisfaction at a day gone well – instead of all that – nothing.
The person walking over this green Welsh grass is a marionette. A wooden toy.
I can’t feel my legs or hands or body. Can’t feel the wind on my face. The sunlight on my skin.
There are thoughts, I suppose, but they seem disembodied. Belonging to no one.
I get back to the farmhouse, waiting for that little pop! of return. A sense of me returning to me.
But there’s no pop. No me.
By the farmhouse wall, a small wooden marionette sits on a wooden bench.
Eases her boots off, eyes closed.
I aim to look like someone casually relaxing in the sunshine. Someone you wouldn’t particularly choose to interrupt or disturb.
I think I become a little less disembodied than I was, but that’s like trying to measure which is bigger, a flea or a louse. You want to say, the hell with it, they’re both tiny.
I go back inside.
A ghost-thing blown on a ghost-wind.
Bowen and Katie are, luckily, both so deep in work that they don’t notice that the High Princess of Planet Nuts has gone completely barking.
They both, mildly euphoric, wave a list at me.
A list of forts. Their ‘strong possibles’.
Maiden Castle, Cadbury Castle, Poundbury Hill, Bathampton Down.
Danebury.
The castles at Uffington, Barbury, Liddington.
Bindon Hill and Solsbury Hill.
Badbury Rings.
Bowen says: ‘We’re not the first to think all this through, of course. Some good scholars have argued for Liddington Castle as the probable site. There’s also tradition linking the battle to Badbury, Bathampton Down, Solsbury Hill. A few other places too.’
And I listen to him and I nod and I feel the sudden dart of Charteris’s presence. Her toughness. Her impatience and seriousness.
I think, she cared about these things too. These things mattered intensely to her as well.
And – not with a pop! exactly, but something softer, a ping, a puff, a slow exhalation – the clarity of that thought returns some clarity, just a little, to me too.
I’m still not right. I still feel clumsy. Makeshift, perhaps, but at least a makeshift version of myself.
And I find myself thinking a new thought, This search for Mount Badon. Weren’t we meant to be given a clue? Why is this so hard?
Also: That theft from Saint Tydecho’s. What was that, really?
For the first time, almost, I wonder if I’ve got this all wrong.
27
That night – a nothing thing. Really nothing.
After supper, Katie and I go upstairs. We don’t have any more stupid fights over who’s sleeping where. Just share the bed as we did before. Except that Katie kicks occasionally, it’s a nice enough way to spend a night.
But before bed, one of those Katie moments. We were in the bathroom. Me, doing my teeth. Her, fiddling at her hair.
She had her hair up in one of those complicated hair-knots. A double twist, a bun within a bun. I watched her fiddle, partly because we were together in a tiny bathroom and where else was I supposed to look? Partly too, because I have a vague curiosity about those long-hair styles and wanted to know how this one worked.
But Katie’s right hand kept letting her down. That whole intricate hair-thing relied on pins and Katie’s right hand no longer had the deftness required to extract the damn things. She managed it with her left hand in the end, but her face wore that grim look it gets. Peering into its ever-darkening future.
‘I’ll cut it all off soon,’ she announced. ‘Shorter than yours.’
Short hair doesn’t seem to me one of the biggest losses there is, so I shrugged. Just helped with the last of the pins and the night-time pony-tail.
The next morning, I stand with her in the bathroom again. Say, ‘What do you want?’
The answer, when I understand it, is a plait that starts with the long hair above the left eye and curves over the forehead to disappear behind the right ear.
I’ve never had long hair myself and have never had enough hair to braid. On top of which, I’m an almost total incompetent in matters which, to some women, seem to come as naturally as breathing. Nevertheless, I do as Katie asks. Get quite into it, actually, and end up making a second plait that starts somewhere over the right ear and slides round behind the other plait towards the other ear. The whole thing takes me several attempts and close to twenty-five minutes, but I’m quite pleased with the outcome and tell Katie she looks like an Anglo–Saxon warrior princess.
‘All ripe for slaughter,’ I say.
‘A household slave,’ she says. ‘That’s what you are. I’ll keep you as my household slave.’
And so, happily bickering, we go down to breakfast.
I’m no longer wooden. I feel myself as well as I ever do. Not brilliant, but OK. Warning lights reset to their ordinary low amber.
But I realise this.
The dissociation. The me-losing-myself thing. That’s happened twice recently. Both times when I was around Katie.
And that’s not coincidence.
She’s dying. A real, properly biological death. Unstoppable. And while I’ve never died, not biologically, I have had my Cotards. Have lived long with my own death. My own internal version of that dark state.
And these recent episodes of mine, I’m having them because of Katie. This new proximity to someone dying. That doesn’t make me want to shun Katie. The opposite. I think, I have to be able to do this. Stand close to death and not go crazy. Step on that edge and feel its wind. But stay stable, stay standing, stay me.
I don’t know if I can do that, but I know I have to try.
It feels like the biggest challenge of my life. The only one that really, truly matters.
28
My weekends and evenings, I find I’m spending increasingly with Katie or, by phone, with Bowen too.
But that still leaves my regular work. My police work.
Boring, repetitive, pleasant, necessary.
We have the call log of Gheerbrant’s ‘Round Table’ phone and we know too the locations of the phones he was calling:
Dinas Powys – surely calls made to and from Gaynor Charteris
Oxford – we presume calls made to and from John Oakeshott
Usk in Monmouthshire – no idea who is involved here
Holborn in London – ditto
Hathersage in Derbyshire – ditto
If we knew who he was calling in Usk, Holborn and Hathersage, we might well have a swift closure of the entire case. But oh my gosh and oh my golly, those numbers do not easily reveal their secrets.
Holborn is by far the hardest of the three locations. The mast which handled the relevant calls covers a bro
ad urban area that includes shops, offices, underground stations and the like. I get lists of addresses and try to check if any of those names are the kind of people I’d expect Gheerbrant to be calling. Academics. Archaeologists. Jewellers. Metalworkers. Antiques dealers.
I get nowhere. I mean, yes, I find some possible matches – everywhere has jewellers for example – but I find nothing that suggests a possible connection. I try Google, the PNC, the Electoral Roll, various business directories, and more.
Nothing.
Try the same kind of thing in Hathersage and Usk. There are fewer possibilities there, but still: nothing.
Jones, who is still trying to get his Wormoldian theories to fit the uncomfortably unWormoldian facts, is also getting nowhere. The whole case has a doomed, career-killing feel to it.
As it happens, I’m pretty confident that the crime – the real crime, I mean – hasn’t yet unfolded. I want to say that to Jones. Tell him not to worry. But though he needs me, he does not love me, and I keep my darker thoughts strictly to myself.
So we work hard. Work efficiently. Accomplish nothing.
Two weeks pass.
I drive up to Carmarthen a couple of times.
See Rhiannon Watkins, my former boss, and her pretty wife, Cal, and let the pair of them treat me like their adopted daughter. We eat and talk and go on walks and don’t talk about policing much, not least because Cal is fairly close to the opposite of a police officer and that kind of conversation ends up excluding her completely.
It’s just nice to see them both.
And meantime, well, I’m happy enough. A warm May is turning into a golden June. Work hard with Katie and Bowen. And I have to say it, our joint project is going very well indeed.
Design: finalised.
Iron-making: well in hand.
Jeweller: all tooled up and ready to go.
Our iron, jet, horn, glass and other bits and pieces are all properly ancient and Katie is running a battery of spectrographic and other tests to make sure they will pass any plausible analysis.
Everything that should be going well is going well, except, except . . .
‘The gold?’ I ask. ‘The gold?’
‘Still trying,’ says Katie brightly.
‘But . . .?’
‘My best plan currently involves an armed attack on Buckingham Palace.’
‘Katie—’
‘Plan B is an arson attack on the Tower of London.’
‘An arson attack on the Tower of London? Excellent. Brilliant. We’ll go with that then.’
‘Or go Irish? I can get some Irish gold of the right age.’
She makes a pretty please face at me. Trying to coax me into acquiescence.
I say, ‘Katie, honestly now, suppose that we actually had Caledfwlch in front of us right here. The real thing. Not a medieval forgery. Not some romanticised idea of what the damn thing might be like. Would you expect to find gold on it?’
She nods, glumly.
‘And, Katie, that gold . . .’
‘. . . would be Welsh. Yes. I mean, with an Arthur from Dinas Powys. He’s only – what? – fifty miles from a functioning mine. Even if those mine workings had decayed since Roman times, there would still have been people alive who knew how it all worked. Who could extract gold if they needed to. It would have been his closest, easiest source and then as well—’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, these things never just operated at a single level, did they? I mean, the gold would have been there for its symbolic meaning, not just because it looked pretty. The gold wouldn’t just say “I’m rich” or “I’m important”. It would also say, “I’m British. I’m a proud Christian Celtic–Briton, the inheritor of that old Roman civilisation.” And to communicate those things you’d need your gold. Gold from your own culture. Mined by your own miners. Refined by your own metalworkers. Worked by your own jewellers.’
‘So we need Welsh gold.’
‘Yes.’
‘Fifth-century gold from Dolaucothi.’
‘Yes.’
‘And we don’t have any.’
‘No.’
‘And your best plan is an armed raid on Buckingham Palace.’
‘Or the Tower,’ says Katie with an it’s-not-as-bad-as-you-think shrug ’n’ grin combo.
I grimace.
I’m annoyed, but I’m also puzzled. If we can’t get the right kind of gold, then they can’t. And if they can’t, then . . .
Once again, I have the feeling that I’m missing something. There’s something I haven’t yet fathomed.
I don’t sleep much but when I do, I keep my gun, fully loaded, within a short arm-reach of desire. I don’t use it. Seldom even touch it. But I like knowing it’s there.
I smoke too much. Work too hard. Eat badly. Sleep worse.
29
And then – and then—
Finally. One of my problems is solved. No stroke of genius on my part. Just life choosing to deliver something that had seemed out of reach.
It’s early June. Trees are wearing their happy green. That frolicking new summer youthfulness that is a wilful forgetting of every cold October, every cruel November.
It’s Saturday.
I’m wearing a floaty pink skirt and a striped pistachio-and-coffee top that’s on the older side, but still a favourite. The weather is warm enough to permit such things, and mine are not the only pair of white Welsh legs to think the same.
I’ve spent a morning shopping with Kay. I bought nothing. Kay returned two dresses and bought one. Of the two she returned, one had been worn for an entire night, with the store tag carefully tucked down the back. (‘You have to put cling film over the tag,’ Kay explained. ‘That way it doesn’t get stained and they can’t say anything.’ She told me that, like it was some kind of law.)
I’m meeting Bev down at the pool later but, for now, I have a sandwich, a bottle of orange juice, and a floaty skirt, and I intend to deploy those assets where and how they are most effective: in Bute Park, under a tree, with my nose in a good philosophy book.
I intend.
I have an intention.
If you intend to do a certain thing and then don’t do it, even though you are entirely free to do so, was it ever an intention in the first place? I’ve got to say not. Intention is a matter of action, not just state of mind. If you ‘intend’ to give up smoking but don’t go so much as a day without lighting up, then your intention was a nothing. It never existed.
But, but, but.
What if you intend to do a certain thing – in my case: sit in Bute Park with a floaty pink skirt and a philosophy book – and then don’t do it, because something else comes along? A thing that doesn’t prevent your executing that intention, but does suddenly, swiftly and totally re-order your priorities? A thing such as – just by way of example – the sharp yap of police sirens. A movement of people. A sudden tremble in this urban atmosphere.
In that case, the hell with it. I say, allow the girl her intention. It was a good intention. A sound intention. An intention that may yet come into being.
But priorities change
I walk not to the park but away from it. Down the Boulevard de Nantes, then cutting across Gorsedd Gardens – hurrying across Gorsedd Gardens – running, actually running, across Gorsedd Gardens to the National Museum Cardiff.
Squad cars.
Police tape.
A scurry of armed officers.
Exiting the museum: people. Visitors and staff. An armed officer standing guard, radio bleating on his shoulder.
At the police tape, I show my warrant card. Step through. Ask what’s happening.
The answer: armed intruders have stormed the gallery. Are stealing art. Have taken hostages, maybe as many as sixteen.
The guy who tells me this is barely able to conceal his delight. His tone and his swagger say, ‘Oh? What? The rifle? Yes, semi-automatic, a SIG 516 actually. Annoying thing to carry around, but—’, nonchalant shrug, ‘Armed raid, hostages:
what you going to do? Honestly, some days, it’s just work, work, work.’
These guys try to affect a kind of nonchalance, but they bloody love it.
And me?
Well, I don’t like armed coppers on the streets of Cardiff. And I definitely don’t like weapons in the hands of bad guys. And I seriously, seriously don’t like the sound of sixteen hostages. That news casts a grim and midnight shade, red-fringed with danger.
But inside all the bad news, I think answers may lurk. Answers and solutions.
So I carry my juice, my philosophy book and my thwarted intentions to a low step near the museum’s south-east corner. I’m still within the perimeter of the police tape, but at a distance from the main entrance. Twice, a uniform comes over to shoo me away, but I show them my warrant card and act sticky and in the end everyone has something better to do than get rid of a fairly small orange-juice-drinking detective.
Time goes by.
The building is cleared.
After that first flurry of activity, there’s not much to do and I slowly tease out the story of what actually happened, piece by piece, from my fellow-officers.
What happened was this:
Three men wearing dark clothes entered the museum, separately, at around eleven o’clock. The museum operates a security search at the entrance, but it’s hardly airport-quality. A few instances of minor vandalism aside, the museum has simply never experienced major problems. In any case, it seems like the men managed to walk through security carrying two pistols, a few packets of firecrackers and a bagful of smoke grenades. Those grenades sound like fairly high-end equipment but, it turns out, you can buy them from Amazon for a few quid.
The pistols, however, appear to be real.
Not fakes. Not drilled-out replicas. Real.
Procuring weapons in Britain isn’t either cheap or easy, so the presence of genuine firearms suggests a measure of forward planning. On the other hand, the rest of the men’s ‘plan’ – if you can call it that – appears to have been simple. They rendezvoused in the room that normally houses La Parisienne, an early portrait by Renoir and one of the museum’s principal treasures. Alas, the painting – all ten million pounds of it – was away for cleaning. The men, captured on good quality CCTV, seemed to be bemused by its absence.
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 18
