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

by Harry Bingham

  ‘But that’s expensive . . .’

  ‘Or kill myself a sheep and turn it into vellum.’

  ‘Lots of hassle and also expensive.’

  ‘Or I could just take an old document and clean it.’

  ‘Exactly,’ says Katie. ‘Exactly, exactly, exactly.’

  Palimpsest.

  A manuscript page from which the text has been washed or scraped off to permit re-use. One text overlaying another. A palimpsest.

  Codicologists like that sort of thing. Palaeographers too.

  That Maps and Manuscripts poster plus those words – codicology and palaeography – gave me the nudge I needed to figure this thing out.

  Katie stares at my grey plastic carry case.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s an alternative light source lamp. Our CSI guys use them to find organic remains. Semen. Saliva. Sweat. Urine. That kind of thing. Anything which goes fluorescent under strong blue or UV light.’

  Katie stares. ‘Organic remains?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like boiled horse? Those sort of remains?’

  I shrug. Don’t know. But it’s got to be worth a try.

  We darken the room. Pull curtains across the windows. Kill the light. Throw a pillow at the door, so no light filters in from below. You don’t have to make a place totally dark, but it does help.

  I get the flashlight. The filters. Hand some safety goggles to Katie.

  I try first with visible blue light, seen through an orange filter.

  I think we get flickers, but it’s hard to tell. The vellum itself is organic, so we need to find a light source that successfully differentiates between sheepskin and animal glue.

  I fool around a bit. I know the basics, but I’m no expert.

  Say, ‘We’ll try UV.’

  I switch things around.

  Cock it up. Get it right.

  Point the torch beam.

  Point the beam and – shazam!

  The vellum damn near bursts with light. A storm of phosphorescence. Because the lamplight is actually invisible to the human eye, that phosphorescence is the only bright thing in this darkened room. It looks almost glaring. Almost too bright.

  And that brightness isn’t random. It’s patterned. And the pattern does not correspond to the ordinary visible text.

  We have found a new layer of writing lying invisible beneath the first.

  A palimpsest. We have a palimpsest.

  And the thing that was missing is missing no more.

  35

  It’s not even hard.

  We go back to the same lab that originally dated the vellum for us. Say we think there’s some older text buried under the newer one.

  And there is. Not one text even, but two. A single Welsh sheep doing threefold service over the centuries.

  The scientist who comes out of his office to report is Italian. Young. A Ph.D. researcher recently scooped up from the University of Padua.

  He’s nice-looking. Biceppy and fit, but in a way that suggests casualness, rather than hours working in an over-mirrored gym. He wears a dark-blue shirt, designer glasses and has skin the colour of creamy coffee.

  He says, ‘You are police? You need these images fast?’

  I say, ‘It’s a murder enquiry and we need them yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday, I’m not so sure. And if you want good quality result, I need a few days. It’s not one text, only. It is three.’ He layers his hands like a sandwich. ‘But for quick version – “quick and dirty”, yes? – I can do right now. Maybe come back at four, five o’clock?’

  Katie and I go in to town. Sit in a café, then go for a walk by a murky Oxford river. Water under willows. A scurry of moorhens.

  At four o’clock, we go back to the lab, which lives in a rattly Edwardian building on Banbury Road. Katie goes for a pee. Comes back wearing lip gloss. A dab of colour on her cheeks.

  She looks at me looking at her and says, ‘Well?’

  Well nothing, but I laugh anyway. That bucket list. Have amazing sex with someone I won’t hate afterwards. And why not, Katie, and why not?

  ‘He’s probably got a girlfriend.’ Katie says.

  I tell her he has a fat and violently tempered Italian wife, to whom he is unreasonably devoted.

  ‘Not devoted enough to wear a wedding ring,’ says Katie.

  ‘Well, he’s probably Catholic. No sex before marriage.’

  ‘So he’ll be unbelievably horny. He won’t be able to stop himself.’

  We sit in a little waiting area and look at stupid magazines.

  Outside the window, an Oxfordy rain falls on Victorian slate and chimney pots. I think of Oakeshott lying face down in that sullen canal. Floating there in that gently rocking mess of sticks and drink bottles and broken polystyrene.

  I suddenly realise: Gaynor Charteris. I don’t know what’s happened to Gaynor Charteris.

  Has she been cremated? Buried? I don’t know.

  I wish I had her here now. Her head only, in that leaking plastic shopping bag. Position it somewhere that she could see her palimpsest. The careful lab work. The text emerging from the past.

  What thoughts occupy Katie, I don’t know, but I just clasp Charteris’s stony presence to me. Feel its chill comfort. Its impatient approval of our work.

  At five, the Italian guy – Matteo – brings the best images he’s been able to extract. The hard thing wasn’t finding the buried texts, but separating the two.

  He promises more work and better texts, but rolls his eyes when I ask for timing.

  ‘I work hard, but . . .’

  He waves his hand aerially.

  Katie laughs and holds his eyes longer than she needs to.

  I keep saying everything’s urgent and Katie says we need Matteo’s help, so he agrees to stay late.

  We work till seven, then go out to a restaurant with an urban coolness so intense, it’s almost desperate. Its menu includes a wagyu burger, whatever that is. Lots of things that involve broad bean salsas and wilted chard and pomegranate molasses.

  The waiter wears an apron in brown suede and I ask him if the pomegranate molasses is organic. He goes back to the kitchen to find out. When he returns and says, ‘No, sorry, it isn’t,’ I look faintly surprised and what-kind-of-place-is-this regretful and order the fish pie that I was always going to have anyway.

  Once, as she grips the menu, Katie’s hand fails and the menu falls. Matteo looks startled and Katie says brusquely, ‘It’s a stupid nerve thing.’ She shrugs, dismissing it.

  Matteo lets it go.

  We turn to the images we brought from the lab.

  I’m of no help here, but watch the two experts as they slowly start to piece together that lowest script, the oldest of our vellum’s three layers.

  They work letter by letter.

  G. W. Y. R.

  Space.

  Then something which looks like an A and another space.

  Then A. E. T. H.

  The food arrives. Food and a bottle of Italian red wine. But Matteo’s not happy.

  He says, ‘This can’t be right. That’s not Latin. It’s not English.’ He mutters about redoing the imaging.

  ‘Welsh,’ I tell him. ‘It’s Welsh.’

  Bit by bit, our text emerges.

  Gwyr a aeth gatraeth veduaeth uedwn.

  fyryf frwythlawn oed cam nas kymhwyllwn.

  The language is Welsh, certainly, but not as it’s spoken now. This is Old Welsh. Ancient. A language both familiar and deeply strange. It’s as though I’m reading through the greenish glass of an old bottle-end. It’s not just the words themselves that are shifted and distorted, it’s the thought too. The world that gave rise to the text. A world of warfare and bloodshed, four-square and direct. Without euphemism, evasion or compromise.

  I attempt a translation into modern English.

  ‘Men went to – I’m not sure. A place name. Catraeth, I suppose. I’m not sure what that would be in English. Men went to Catraeth, no
urished with wine? Or mead, maybe? I’m going to go with mead. Then sturdy and strong, it would be wrong not to praise them.’

  As I speak, Katie shows a sudden frown of concentration. Recognition even.

  She says, ‘That place. Catraeth. It’s Catterick. In Yorkshire.’

  ‘Catterick?’

  I’m not sure what I was expecting, exactly, but I don’t think Catterick fits into anything. I’m taken aback and probably show it.

  Katie says, ‘This poem here. It’s the Y Gododdin.’

  ‘No it isn’t. It’s either The Gododdin or Y Gododdin. It can’t be The The Gododdin.’

  Katie gives me her slave look.

  I give her my fuck-off-out-of-my-country-and-leave-my-cattle-just-where-you-found-them look.

  When we’re done glaring, Katie explains. ‘OK. This manuscript. If the rest of it matches up, what we’ve got here is a copy of Y Gododdin, a well-known praise poem written in early Welsh. The poem tells the story of a British–Celtic assault on an Anglo–Saxon stronghold in Catterick. The attack failed and the poem is one of praise and lament for the fallen warriors. The battle took place in about 570 AD, or about seventy years after any battle at Mount Badon. As far as we know, the events of the poem are basically true.’

  I’m puzzled by this. Puzzled enough that I, once again, wonder if my reading of this case has gone wrong somewhere. But Katie is still talking. Still explaining.

  ‘OK, so the most interesting thing about the poem is its date. Some scholars put the date of composition right close to the battle itself, so some time in the late sixth century.’

  I say, ‘So, OK, so we’ve got a really old poem. What I don’t get is . . .’

  Katie interrupts, so quietly that both Matteo and I have to lean in to hear her.

  ‘This poem is famous, because of a few lines near the end.’

  So famous, in fact, the poem has its own page on Wikipedia.

  Katie brings up the page on her phone and says, ‘OK, so here the poet is talking about a warrior called – bloody hell, you guys have stupid names – Gwawrddur. Is that right? Anyway, the relevant bit goes like this.’

  She recites:

  He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress

  Though he was no Arthur

  Among the powerful ones in battle

  In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade.

  I stare.

  Matteo stares.

  Quite by chance, the restaurant enters one of those momentary silences where everyone happens to reach a conversational pause at the exact same time. But that’s not what it feels like. It doesn’t feel like a chance thing. It feels like that name, the magic of that name, has reached through time, through the centuries, and left a little thumbprint of silence. A little pool through which we feel the pull of those years, those battles.

  I say, ‘So this poem is talking about real events?’

  Katie: ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this guy, Gwawrddur, he’s a real person?’

  ‘As far as we know, yes.’

  ‘And the poem is ancient. Perhaps even written within living memory of Arthur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the poem says, it says right here, “OK, this guy Gwawrddur, he was a really awesome warrior. He wasn’t as good as Arthur, but he was still pretty damn awesome.”’

  ‘That’s what the poem says, yes. And, if you’re a George Bowen-type, this poem is about the strongest proof we have that Arthur was a real guy. This poem isn’t about myth-making. There’s no legend here, just history. And a poet, talking to his audience, seemingly certain that they’ll all know who Arthur is.’

  And we found a copy of that poem in a church sacred to Arthur’s nephew and built just a few miles from the scene of Arthur’s last battle.

  I have that sense, click click click, of tumblers falling into place. Things finally starting to line up properly for the very first time.

  I say, ‘Sorry. The other text, we need to look at that.’

  The other text. The middle layer of this palimpsest.

  And we do. But I can’t read that strange medieval script. Katie and Matteo can do the business there. So I leave the two of them to do their stuff. Leave them to their food, their drink, their flirting.

  Go to my car. Get a joint. Smoke.

  Walk randomly through this mild Oxford night.

  Street lamps and cars. Shop-fronts and pedestrians.

  I sit on the crumbly brick of an old Edwardian wall and blow ganja smoke at these neon-lit stars. I miss Charteris again. Wish I knew if she’d been buried. I normally hear about funerals. I’d have certainly gone to hers.

  When I go back to the restaurant, Katie and Matteo aren’t bending over Matteo’s print-outs. They’re gazing into each other’s eyes and laughing.

  Katie’s bucket list. Looks to me like she’s only an hour or two from notching up another item ticked.

  I say hi and they move apart. Share their good news.

  That middle text was simple. Clear and easy to decipher.

  ‘We think this is late eleventh century,’ says Katie. ‘Written not long after the Norman Conquest. And it looks like a document granting permission for some Welsh warriors to make a visit to a place called Swine Hill. It’s not clear why the warriors wanted to make this trip, but it appears they were willing to pay some real money for the privilege, as the document makes reference to a payment having been made.’

  I say, ‘Swine Hill?’

  Katie: ‘Well, the document refers to the place as Suinedune. That’s how it appears in the Domesday Book. It’s grown a bit since then, mind you. It’s the city we call Swindon.’

  Suinedune.

  Swine Hill.

  Swindon.

  Just outside Swindon, there’s a prominent chalk hill and on that hill, a fort. Liddington Castle, long claimed to be a possible site for Mount Badon, and one of those sites that Bowen and Katie identified as a leading contender.

  I say – hear myself saying – ‘We’ve done well. Very well.’ Have one of those out-of-body moments, as I say thank you, say good night, and drive home to Cardiff.

  Mount Badon. The mother of all ancient battles. And the place where this case will reach its climax.

  36

  Tuesday.

  Bleddyn Jones and Gethin Matthews.

  Matthews is of the opinion that you can’t really yell at someone who voluntarily took the place of a sick hostage.

  Jones is still of the opinion that he’d rather boil and eat his own leg than work with me any longer.

  I listen to them go at it, then say, ‘Look.’

  Pause.

  Am I really going to do this? Am I really going to say this?

  I think I am.

  So I go ahead and say it.

  ‘Look, I do know I’m a pest. Dennis Jackson used to tell me so on a weekly basis and he was right, I know he was. But recently – I don’t know, I suppose it’s all got a bit much. It all gets to me sometimes. Maybe I just need a few weeks off? Do something relaxing. Get myself into the right headspace again. Come back to work fresher. More disciplined.’

  Jones receives this speech with startlement to begin with, then with strong and increasingly emphatic support. His nods become massive headswaying things, beech trees in the first gusts of a thunderstorm.

  He believes, I think, that this is my breakthrough moment. The moment when, thanks to his own firmness and wisdom, I finally see myself for who I am. See myself and seek change.

  Gethin Matthews knows me a little better than that, and he looks suspicious.

  ‘This is real, Fiona, is it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Humble head. Humble voice.

  ‘And how many weeks are we talking exactly?’

  I stare at him. How the heck would I know?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just . . . a few weeks.’

  Matthews looks at Jones, seeking his view.

  Jones says, ‘I think it would be a great idea. Fiona’s really
taking responsibility here.’

  Matthews stares at me, then shrugs. ‘Fine.’

  Jones offers some patronising words of advice that I don’t really hear. Just put in the syllable recycling bin.

  Matthews tells me about some bureaucratic hoops that will need to be hopped through. I promise to hop through them all.

  Then, Matthews: ‘So, what will you do with your break? Any plans?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’ve got quite into archaeology. Maybe find a dig to get involved with.’

  We sit for a minute or two ticking off the most obvious conversational topics – amazing what they find, fresh air good for you, that kind of thing. And, once we’ve completed our whistle-stop tour through the realm of cliché, I walk – slightly dazed – to my desk.

  Indefinite leave.

  Leave that, however it’s dressed up, follows a formal written warning and then a further, emphatic challenge from my commanding officer. Truth is, I’ve never been closer to losing my career in policing. Never closer to that shivery brink.

  I do check with everyone I know – Watkins, Matthews, Bev, Rogers, everyone – that Jackson is coming back and yes, they say, as far as they know, he most likely is. But no one has a date. And everyone puts in those worrying little qualifiers. Most likely. Should think so. Can’t see him staying away from all this (little chuckle, change of subject).

  I have already checked, of course, that an archaeological dig has been scheduled for Liddington Hill. And yes – O surprise almighty – a dig has in fact just got underway. These things generally rely heavily on skilled volunteers, so I get Katie to recommend me and they’re happy to accept my help.

  I drift round the office. Say my see-you-soons.

  And wander out into a future unknown.

  37

  Liddington Castle.

  A high, blowy, chalky knoll. Grass-covered and windy.

  And it’s strange, in a way. The M4 motorway churns below. Swindon’s busy industrial heart – all vast warehouses and sleek offices – a long stone’s throw beyond. But you don’t have to be up here long, within these ramparts, these ditches, before the modern world just blows away from you. Vanishes into the long grass, the hiss of chalk.

  And as this new world goes, old ones rise to take its place.