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

by Harry Bingham

  The world of those Iron Age Celts, my ancestors.

  The world of the Romans. Those southern invaders with their tunics, their wines, their strange, ungainly tongue.

  And then the world that came after. Bloodshed at every border. Picts to the north. Those muscled blond mercenaries to the east.

  Were these ditches redug? These ramparts refortified? What councils were held in low voices, behind these earthen walls, around these huddled fires? And was it here – on this high land, upon this windy hill – that the greatest battle of ancient days was fought? The battle that, for one golden generation, seemed to drive those eastern invaders back?

  I don’t know. No one does. But this dig might yet find out.

  Our team consists of three or four proper professionals. A pair of lecturers – one from Reading, one from Southampton. Two graduate students using this dig as part of their Ph.D. research, the way that Katie had wanted to in Dinas Powys.

  The rest of us – a dozen at most, just three or four when the wind is sharpest and the rains keenest – are volunteers. Students or committed local amateurs. One intense girl who tells me (too often and too earnestly) that this is a mindfulness thing for her, you know? That London is, like, really intense? She tells me, if I let her, about ley lines and sacred fountains and the deep vibrations of Mother Earth.

  She wears a lump of black tourmaline on a leather cord around her neck and wants me to do the same.

  We dig.

  Sometimes, in fact, that does mean pushing a spade into the ground and just humping it out, the way a builder would.

  But it’s not mostly that. Once we’ve cut a trench or pit, once we’ve cut through a millennium and a half of history to expose a Dark Age soil, we go slow. Our tools are little trowels. Scrapers. Stubby brushes and buckets of water.

  I don’t really understand why one trench is planted in one place and one in another. There’s a logic to these things, I suppose, but what that is, I don’t know. Just do as I’m told.

  Work hard. Get muddy.

  And, as the sun slopes down for its evening rest, I walk down the hill with the others, enjoying the ache that speaks of a day gone well.

  After work, at first, I would shoot back to Cardiff, a commute that takes not much more than an hour. But, this dig has its own rules, its own little social system. So, increasingly, I don’t just zoom off to my warm bath and comfortable bed. I head to the pub with the others. Or go to barbecues hosted by one of the locals. Or sit in a campsite with some of the London students and gaze into their bonfire and smoke cannabis of a strength and potency my pinkish Celtic lungs are quite unused to.

  We talk of a hundred things, of course.

  Food. The best clothes to wear. Our colleagues.

  And the dig. We talk about the dig.

  The stated goals of this project have to do with all those good things that Katie and Gaynor Charteris were looking at in Dinas Powys. Evidence of trade. Of lifestyle. Of diet. Of ironworking.

  Good, sober, dutiful research.

  But it’s not those themes that we talk about as we gaze into the flames of our fire. Not what we talk about as we blow ganja smoke up into the sky above. We talk – daily, earnestly, obsessively – about Arthur. It’s well known that Liddington Castle is a possible candidate for Mount Badon. No evidence for the theory has ever been found, but then again the site has never been properly excavated. That sounds strange, yet it’s true nevertheless. Britain just has so many ancient sites that only a fraction of them have been fully explored, Liddington Castle included.

  That said, it’s known that in the centre of the castle there is a large pit one and a half metres across and at least two and a half metres deep. But the archaeologists who found that pit never explored it fully. On the contrary: a preliminary soil bore conducted last year, showed that the thing descends at least eighteen metres. At Wapley Hill in Herefordshire a similar structure – a ‘ritual shaft’ – goes fully thirty-three metres down.

  What treasures might our own shaft hold? What treasures might we come across in one of our criss-crossing trenches?

  No one knows. That’s the beauty of the quest.

  Our two lecturers – Simon Tifford from Reading University and Ann Wisbech, an acid-tempered Londoner – take care of strategy. We just do as they tell us. Dig carefully. Live our muddily contented life under this sun, these stars.

  I get to know the area too. Not just the few acres occupied by the actual hill fort, but the fields and farms and footpaths around.

  On one of my excursions, I see a little construction site, fenced off and hung about with ‘considerate contractor’ notices. The site lies about four hundred metres from the Castle.

  No one’s present. A small digger – sporting a phone number and address belonging to a plant hire company in Cwmbran, Gwent – sits idle.

  I am very happy to see it. So happy, indeed, I have to sit down on the grass and smoke a joint, right then and there. I take a photo.

  And as I sit, a man comes past, walking his dogs.

  I say hello.

  He says hello.

  Because I’m polite, I say hello to his dogs too and they say hello back in doggese, licking my hand and smelling my ankles.

  I ask the man if the construction site has been here long. What it’s for.

  He doesn’t know. ‘Some drainage thing,’ he thinks. They were here about a month, but are mostly packed up now.

  I tell him thanks.

  Lie flat out on the earth, feeling a pale sun push at my eyelids.

  One evening, I finish work early and zoom back to Cardiff. I promised Ed and Jill that I’d have them round to mine for supper, and I’m making good on my promise. I’ve invited Katie too, because I think everyone will get on with everyone and because somehow four is a less weird number than three.

  Katie arrives, bringing news.

  Our Caledfwlch is finished. She has pictures. Shows me them all.

  And Caledfwlch looks awesome. Genuinely stunning.

  ‘We have to bash it about,’ says Katie. ‘Rust it. Age it. All of that. But doesn’t it look great?’

  It does, and I say so, and I mean it.

  Then I take her phone and delete the pictures. ‘Better safe than sorry,’ I tell her.

  Then Ed and Jill arrive.

  I do the introductions. Unleash the meal. Beef stew, which is hardly summery, but which is so easy to do that even I can’t mess it up. Proper wine. Eight pound a bottle stuff, which is pricey enough that I figure it has to be non-crap. A supermarket pudding, but from their premium range. Cheese served with grapes and celery because I couldn’t remember which one you were meant to serve with cheese, so played safe and offered both.

  And I don’t cock anything up and Ed says, ‘You cooked this, Fi?’ and I fess up about the supermarket pudding but bask happily in the deserved glory of my stew.

  And everyone does indeed get on. And we have a nice time. A genuinely nice social thing that I arranged and that happened under my roof and in my kitchen. I feel stupidly proud.

  And at one point, after the cheese but before the coffee, Ed engineers a moment of privacy. He says, ‘Jill and I are going out to Sicily this August. A fortnight’s break.’

  And I say, ‘That’s nice,’ and try to remember what you’re meant to say about other people’s holidays.

  And he says, ‘I think that’s when I’m going to do it. I mean, that kind of thing is corny, but you’re allowed to be corny sometimes, I reckon.’

  And I think: Do what? I have no idea. I don’t understand why humans can’t speak more directly.

  And then I think: Oh. He means get engaged. Pop the question. Do that thing with rings.

  And I say, ‘Great,’ and ‘Oh, wow,’ and ‘I’m so happy for you.’ And I think I mean each one of those noble sentiments, but a part of me feels huge and hollow and cavernous and empty, and my head feels high and light and a very long distance from the ground. There is a thin rushing sound, like air leaking from
a punctured tyre.

  What does that mean? I don’t know. I have no idea. It probably means nothing at all except that I am not a very grounded human being and I lose my bearings with remarkable ease.

  At eleven-thirty, everyone filters out into the night.

  I try to think about the Ed thing, but can’t really. Just can’t seize hold of it. Instead I go to my iPad and spend an hour or so looking at those crime scene pictures of Gaynor Charteris.

  Her corpse.

  Her head.

  That ragged stump of neck.

  I tell her that finally, finally, the real crime is coming. The one we’ve been waiting for. The one for which she, poor dear, was only ever a messenger.

  She tells me that she understands. She understands everything.

  I have my gun by my bed all night, fully loaded and safety on. But for once it brings me no comfort. Even holding its chill metal against my forehead, I can feel no rest.

  I can’t cry. Have only cried once in my adult life. But there is something jammed and choking in my throat. My eyes. A sort of dry heave of emotion that seeks to release something, but can’t.

  So I half-sit, half-lie through these night-time hours. Jammed with a feeling I can’t describe. Holding a gun that brings no comfort. Lying beneath covers that bring no sleep.

  38

  My days: digging. My nights, increasingly, at the campsite near Liddington.

  This life enfolds me. Binds me to its rhythms. I have so little anchorage of my own, that I’m quick to lose myself to other seas.

  Even so, I do, of course, keep in touch with Operation Blade. Log in to the system most days. Call Jones.

  The news: nothing much.

  Alden Gheerbrant has been pulled in for another round of fruitless questioning.

  The team chasing the museum robbery has nothing helpful. Plenty of DNA and fingerprints, yes, but nothing that shows up on the system. The e-fits have been widely distributed, but no useful identifications have come in.

  The one titbit of real interest to me is that it looks as though the tunnel into the museum was professionally built. Literally, I mean. Not just by blokes with spades, but trained professionals who knew exactly where and how to support the tunnel.

  I send Jones a photo of that Cwmbran digger. Tell him where I found it.

  He emails me back, thanking me, and wishing me well ‘for your recovery’.

  My recovery.

  Tosspot.

  Meantime, Matteo and Katie have finished their work on our palimpsest.

  I get the two of them to write up their findings. Nudge them into co-authoring a blog, which goes on the laboratory’s regular website. Then, as Gwenhwyfar, I hop around a few Arthurian chat sites, linking excitedly to the Katie/Matteo blog. I don’t comment much. Just say things like, ‘Look at this. It’s massive!’ Then vanish.

  The internet does the rest. The response on the message boards is little short of feverish.

  Partly, there’s a genuine historical interest in the vellum. Although the Gododdin poem was well known, that Llanymawddwy manuscript looks like being the earliest known version of the text. And the poem was found in a church founded, it’s said, by Arthur’s own nephew. Those two things alone guaranteed some kind of internet sensation, albeit that the sensation is limited, mostly, to Arthur nuts.

  But, but, but.

  That later text – the middle layer of the palimpsest.

  That text tells us: Warriors from a place associated with Arthur paid good money to travel to a place long associated with his most famous battle.

  It’s a huge fact. Huge enough that it gets a glancing mention in one or two of the national newspapers. One blogger reproduces photos of that bear-and-crown seal box from Dinas Powys above a caption that reads, ‘Is this King Arthur’s seal box?’

  The chain of clues that I’ve pursued so long is flashing bright red now.

  The seal box. A lump of carved stone that seems to connect Dinas Powys to Arthur’s final battlefield at Camlan. An old poem, mentioning Arthur, discovered in the church founded by Arthur’s own nephew. All that plus a document that seems, surely, to suggest that something of vast worth is to be found somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood of Swindon.

  What, after all, could those things mean?

  We don’t know. No one does. But the interest among enthusiasts is intense.

  If our little dig was averaging six or eight volunteers before, we’re never less than fifteen strong now, and our project leaders turn away five or even ten helpers for every one they accept.

  We get used to spectators too. Never very many, but sometimes five or six at a time, wielding binoculars and cameras and thermoses of tea.

  Our trenches do in fact find some arrowheads. Some crumbled leather. Broken buckles. Coins. Not enough to say that yes, a battle did take place here, but not so few that you could say no, it didn’t. In those days, bits of iron had real value, so battlefields were carefully picked over for their leavings.

  We haven’t yet completed our criss-crossing trenches, but work has already started on that central pit, the ritual shaft.

  The pit is taken quickly down to two and a half metres. Then four. Then eight.

  It’s exciting work, but also frustrating. The limited working space means we can only have two people down there at any one time. They work by hand – spade by spade – and our only mechanical support is a powered hoist that lifts buckets of waste out of the hole. As we go further down, we buttress the shaft’s walls with sheets of ply nailed into a rough octagonal cross-section.

  When we’ve excavated the shaft down to ten metres, we have a little celebration. Drinking prosecco out of white plastic cups.

  Because of the increased traffic to the site, a local farmer turns a corner of one of his fields into a little car park. Charges one pound a day for parking.

  I fiddle around on Amazon and buy a couple of motion-triggered security cameras. Portable things that work from batteries. I stick them in the hedge near the cars.

  The ritual shaft gets down to fourteen metres.

  The spoil we’re taking out is increasingly rich in the clutter of ancient life and, especially, ancient warfare. Plenty of arrowheads now. An axe. A knife that, to eyes more expert than mine, looks fifth or sixth century.

  It looks Arthurian.

  The people who follow this stuff all share it on social media, which means that news of our finds rapidly circulates.

  At night and all through the weekend, the ritual shaft is closed off with anti-climb wire fencing. That’s mostly a basic safety measure: we don’t want kids tumbling into our hole. But it’s more than that. The site is of sufficient interest that it’s potentially at risk from vandals. Looters, even. Tifford and Wisbech find the numbers for some local security firms. Make calls.

  The shaft deepens.

  Sixteen metres.

  Most nights now, I sleep in the campsite with my fellow volunteers. I have my own sleeping bag. A tent. A camping stove and metal cooking pots. A Tupperware box with my own supply of weed and Rizla papers.

  We dig.

  We eat.

  We sleep.

  We work.

  39

  Midsummer day. The summer solstice.

  At five in the morning, a golden sunlight gilds the nylon outers of our tents. My own berth – aqua blue with flashes of girly pink – goes from chilly to boiling in what seems like a matter of minutes.

  I get up. Shower in the little shower block. There’s a solar-heating thing on the roof which is meant to guarantee hot water, but definitely, definitely doesn’t.

  I endure the experience as long as I can, then dry off.

  Make tea.

  Drink, sitting on a tree stump and looking into the embers of last night’s fire. For all that my tent feels like an oven the air temperature is still frigid and I sit with a thick fleece over my T-shirt.

  Other people start to emerge, spiky-haired and blinking.

  One of the guys, Adam, ha
tes the cold and wriggles out in his sleeping bag, hi-tech and shiny blue. A giant maggot, in search of porridge.

  The air warms.

  We talk and eat and tamp ourselves into shape for the coming day.

  At eight or so, we trudge up the hill.

  Start work.

  Slowly to begin with, then faster as we get in the swing of it.

  And at nine-forty – so soon! – there’s shouting from the fencing around our ritual shaft. Those of us who are employed on the more mundane trenching work drop our tools and run over.

  A bone. Someone is holding a human bone. A tibia, or something like it. The soil is coming up black and sooted.

  Burned.

  Then more bones. Incomplete some of them, but not sheep, not cow, not goat. One of the bones is notched, as though injured in battle.

  Also: arrowheads, spear-tips, buckles.

  The gory clutter of ancient war.

  Tifford and Wisbech are pretty much pissing themselves with excitement. You spend your whole career in archaeology, putting in the hours, writing your papers on Patterns of Cultivation in Iron Age Kent or whatever the hell you write about. But you came into this game for its Indiana Jones moments: the opening of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, unearthing the Rosetta Stone, the stumbled discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  You long held those fantasies but knew them for what they were: fantasies. Only now, here, on a windy hill, something enormous, something beyond description, looms into view.

  A ritual shaft in an Iron Age fort.

  An Arthurian knife.

  Human bones.

  Signs of battle.

  All those things plus this is Mount Badon. Rumour has murmured that for years, but it’s pretty much shouting it now. You want some slaughtered Saxons? You want to see a pile of murdered warriors? We’ve got warriors for you, mate. We’ve got bones.

  Except around the shaft, no work is being done any more.

  Every bone that comes up is being cleaned, photographed, recorded. Those of us without an active role, just hang around, smoke roll-ups, watch everything.

  By midday, we have a crowd of a hundred people watching. A journalist from the local paper. Tifford summons one of his security firms, and a baffled-looking guard in a hi-vis uniform parks his van up near the shaft and sits in his vehicle, door open, listening to Radio Two.