‘Yes.’
‘So she was killed and the seal box was stolen. And, as it turned out, the whole Dinas Powys dig was abandoned and that whole avenue of research was closed off, exactly as the thieves wanted. I mean, yes, there was a whole hoo-hah about her killing, but the Arthur angle basically vanished from sight.’
‘Exactly.’
Jackson stares.
Says, ‘That, roughly, is the story that our friend Jones is currently working with.’
I nod.
‘But it’s rubbish, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, for one thing, if you want to kill Gaynor Charteris, then just kill her for heaven’s sake. Don’t start beheading her and sticking spears into her chest.’
‘Yes.’
He stares some more. Raps his coffee mug gently with his fingers.
I think that means it’s my turn and, in fairness, Jackson hasn’t visited the cathedral library at Bangor, so I fill in the gap. ‘Same thing with Bangor. If you wanted to steal from the library, you’d just go there during normal opening hours. The place was totally unguarded. No one thought there was anything there worth stealing. So you’d just turn up. Take what you wanted. Walk away. You wouldn’t smash a lock. Why bother? Why attract the attention?’
Jackson says, ‘And, OK, it could have been a coincidence that you got to Saint Tydecho’s just as the thieves were busy there. Coincidences do happen, after all. But maybe that’s not the best explanation. Maybe they waited till some bright spark in South Wales made a connection between Gaynor Charteris and the Bangor theft and went up to investigate. As soon as they heard you were investigating further in Bangor, they’d have figured out that your natural next step would take you to Llanymawddwy. So – just possibly – they wanted you to find them. They literally waited till they knew you were on your way.’
‘Yes.’
I remember the scene outside that window by the library in Bangor. A twenty-something curate. A middle-aged woman. An electrician eating his sandwich. Any of them – most likely the ‘electrician’ – could have been there to monitor the movement of police investigators. An arrival I’d already communicated to the gossipy Aled Owen.
I don’t say any of that, but Jackson has this line of thought firmly in his grasp now. ‘And if you wanted to steal something from Llanymawddwy, why take a shotgun? Why not just break in and take what you needed. Why take a weapon?’
‘That’s a very good question, sir. Why take a weapon? Exactly.’
‘So, perhaps you take a gun because you know that a detective is on her way to you. You did want to be found, but you didn’t want to be caught.’
I like to vary my affirmatives, so this time I nod.
‘And if that’s your line of thinking, then we’d have to assume that the thing you found – that bit of vellum – was exactly the thing you were meant to find.’
‘That would seem like a good conclusion to draw, sir, yes.’
‘And if that’s your conclusion in relation to the vellum, then you have to go back to all the Gaynor Charteris stuff and wonder about that too. Maybe that whole thing was a show put on for our benefit too.’
‘Yes, maybe it was.’
‘Which would explain why Charteris was killed in that rather flamboyant way. By cutting her head off and sticking Iron Age spears into her chest, the killers were kind of yelling about the importance of some sort of historical angle. Making sure that a pack of dumb provincial coppers didn’t ignore that side of things. Oh, and, come to think of it, we still haven’t even talked about the museum break-in. Thieves smart enough to dig that tunnel are presumably smart enough to check that the Renoir they want to steal is actually present.’
I don’t answer.
Jackson stares at me. He’s reading me as much as the case, I think, but that’s within the rules, definitely. You use whatever clues you can.
Changing tack, he says, ‘OK, I’m a thief. I’ve just stolen King Arthur’s sword. Presumably I haven’t done all this just so I can hang it on my wall. I want to sell it. But how the hell do I sell it without getting caught?’
I say, ‘Would you like to wipe your hands?’
He stares.
I give him some kitchen towel.
‘Just you do have a bit of butter on your fingers, sir, and I don’t want it on my laptop.’
Jackson, fine man that he is, wipes his hands. We go through to my sitting room and I open up my laptop.
Navigate to Tor.
The. Onion. Router. TOR.
The entrance gate to the dark web.
‘You’ve got this on your computer, Fiona?’ Jackson asks when he realises what we’re looking at.
‘It’s perfectly legal, sir. I mean, if I were a Burmese democracy activist, I might use this to protect myself.’
That rouses a grunt.
For every one Burmese democracy activist that the British police encounter, we come across a thousand users of child pornography. We in the police love Tor the way Donald Trump loves overweight female Mexican Muslim peace activist hippies.
I navigate to Agora and explain, ‘It’s eBay for criminals, basically. Loads of sellers. Loads of buyers. Drugs and guns mostly, but you can sell anything.’
Jackson stares at me. I think he’s wondering how I know all this. How come I have Tor on my computer. How come I have a user account on Agora.
But he doesn’t ask, so I don’t have to tell him about Steve Mason, and a horrible bedsit in Harlesden, and a bottle of cheap Algerian wine, and the way I had to lift my bra as a convicted fraudster checked for wires.
Jackson’s gaze returns to the keyboard.
He finds the Agora search bar and types, ‘King Arthur Sword’.
The browser thinks – slowly, because of the thousand layers of encryption – and returns its results.
The topmost result says, ‘EXCALIBUR. The battle sword of King Arthur. Recovered from Liddington Castle – Mount Badon – 23 June 2016.’
Jackson raises his shaggy eyebrows and clicks through to the sales page.
Photographs.
The sword that we dug out of that hole. The one that sat atop a pile of Saxon bones. The one that glittered a muddy pale gold beneath that unfamiliar sun.
The page is long and detailed.
Little video clips taken from our stolen phones show the sword being retrieved. Pulled out of the ritual shaft. Taken off the hoist. Washed. Some close-ups. Then a little bit of footage of the actual theft. Then a ton of super close-ups of the sword itself. The bear-and-crown image at the base of the sword. The gold thread on the hilt. Some red glass and other jewelling.
Also the price.
‘Bids invited. Fifty million dollars reserve. Buyers will be permitted to conduct ANY non-destructive testing of the sword and its materials prior to completion of the transaction.’
Jackson explores the listing in detail.
I’m already highly familiar with it and lean back, watching him work.
‘Fifty million dollars,’ he says.
‘Minimum. I mean, buyers have to pay in bitcoins, but that’s the dollar equivalent.’
Jackson rubs his chin.
Thinks.
Uses a thick finger to hit the back button. Navigates back to the original page of search results.
He stares with new intensity at the screen.
He’s hardly Generation Laptop. But still, search results are search results. They’re not that hard to read.
He says, ‘No, that’s not right. There are two swords for sale here.’
He’s right.
There are.
Two swords, not one.
He clicks through to the other listing, and gets the same thing, or more or less. Another sword. Similar, but different. The same bear-and-crown stamped into the hilt. Similar use of gold. Some red glass. Jet beads. The blade similarly dinged about and damaged.
This sword has some preliminary spectrographic analysis attached. The kind of stuff you can date
swords with.
Also some still and video images of the snatch itself.
Also a detailed listing of whens and wheres, weights and lengths.
Price for this one: sixty million dollars, minimum.
Jackson gets up to speed.
‘Fiona, there are two swords here. But they only stole one. You guys only dug up the one sword, right?’
He stares at me.
I stare at him.
His eyes burn a question.
I answer it.
‘Do you want to see my one, sir? It’s really good.’
I go to my understairs cupboard, which is a bit of a muddle because it’s quite hard fitting a sword in there along with the mop and the bucket and the vacuum hose and all the other bits you have to keep in those places.
Also, the damn thing is quite heavy – it was built for the greatest warrior of British history, not a somewhat petite Welsh detective – so in the end it’s Jackson who has to haul it out.
‘Excalibur,’ he says. ‘You’ve got Excalibur in your broom cupboard.’
‘Caledfwlch,’ I say, irritably. ‘Arthur was British. He was Celtic. He was almost certainly Welsh. He wouldn’t have used some faked-up Frenchified Latin name for the thing, let alone a name that wasn’t invented until centuries after his death. The proper Welsh name is Caledfwlch. “Hard cleaving” or, if you prefer, “Hard striking”. But yes: I’ve got Caledfwlch in my broom cupboard, or I did have until you yanked it out.’
A bit grumpily, I put back the vacuum hose and the other bits that fell out with the sword.
Jackson fingers the gold, the jet, the horn, the glass, the iron.
Then – because he is a man and a Welsh man at that, one for whom hitting things only ever lies a short half-step from consciousness – he stands in my living room, sword in hand, feeling its heft.
‘It’s a good sword,’ he says.
‘Thank you. It’s my first one.’
‘It handles nicely.’ He says that, like he’s some big expert. ‘But fake.’
He looks at me, to see if I’m going to contradict him.
I contradict him.
‘It’s not fake. It’s properly old. Just – well, it hasn’t always been a sword.’
I explain.
Explain that we used genuine Dark Age iron. Reheated it on a fire that used the right kind of south Welsh hardwoods. Worked it using Dark Age technologies, nothing more. If we had materials we weren’t sure of – we didn’t like the carbon dating stats on some of our glass – we just irradiated it until we had stats we liked.
Mostly though, we proceeded just as our ancestors did.
We used Dark Age jet.
Dark Age horn.
Dark Age glass.
Dark Age gold, and Welsh gold at that.
Aside from that one spot of irradiation, we didn’t use any tool or technique which wasn’t used by our long-ago ancestors.
Jackson is still sceptical.
‘So you’re saying if I took that thing along to—’
‘It’s not that thing. It’s Caledfwlch.’
‘OK. If I took Caledfwlch to the British Museum—’
‘Which you can’t, because it’s mine.’
‘Which I can’t, because it’s yours. But what would they say? Assume the museum could run any test they wanted.’
‘Look, iron is iron and gold is gold, and they’ve been that way since the beginning of time. If you treat everything just right, there’s no reason why you can’t make a perfect replica of anything you want.’ Because Jackson is still looking at me, I answer his question directly. ‘Yes. We could take our sword to the British Museum and, unless we’ve cocked up, they couldn’t determine if it was genuinely ancient or not.’
‘OK. Wow.’
‘And every major museum, the British Museum included, will have fakes in its collections. Fakes that are indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s the dirty secret of the whole antiquities business.’
‘OK, good.’ But Jackson’s thick finger points at my broom cupboard. ‘But you kept your – your Caledfwlch in there. You didn’t dig it out of some muddy hole in Liddington Hill.’
‘Liddington Castle. No.’
‘But an actual sword did come out of the actual shaft at Liddington.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s the sword that the thieves took.’
‘Yes.’
‘The one they’re now selling on the internet. On the dark web.’
‘Yes.’
After Bleddyn Jones, it’s so nice working with Jackson, I want to hug him.
I give him all the yeses he could possibly need.
Jackson: ‘OK. I’m confused here. Help me out. I want to say that the thieves have made a fake of their own. That this whole damn thing was just a way to get their fake onto the market in the best possible way. Except their sword definitely did come out of that hole and yours definitely didn’t.’
I take the laptop. Show him some photos.
Show him that little construction site a few hundred metres from Liddington Castle. The digger with its Cwmbran registration.
I say, ‘These are chalk downs. Chalk. Water drains through chalk, no problem. Yet supposedly this construction site was working on some drainage issue for a month or more. But Thames Water knew nothing about the site. Nor did anyone else I could find. And look, this digger came from a firm in Cwmbran? If you just want to sort out some drainage thing, you can find people to do that pretty much anywhere. You certainly don’t need to go to south Wales for it.’
Jackson: ‘Ha! But you bloody do if you want a bit of mining experience. I mean, I know the mines are pretty much all closed these days, but the expertise is still there, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And we’re probably talking about the exact same experts who figured out a way to get into the museum.’
‘You’d have to think so, yes.’
I tell Jackson about the soil bore at Liddington. The one that was conducted, and its results published, last year.
I say, ‘So our thieves knew the shaft went down a long way. They knew a dig had been scheduled to explore it. So they just came in from the side. Buried some bones, some skulls, some bits of leather armour, that kind of thing. Some of those things they buried there were probably real antiquities. Others would have been modern things just doctored and irradiated to be of the right general age. And because that all looked like a lot of work and expense, they also buried a whole lot of bone-ash, because that would have been the easiest and cheapest thing to manufacture in bulk.
‘Anyway, they do enough to make it look like the ritual shaft carries a mass grave for slaughtered Saxons, then they toss their sword on top. Beaten about. Decorated with the bear-and-crown logo they’ve already alerted us to via Dinas Powys. Then they fill in their tunnel, so it looks like the site was totally untouched. Yes, they have to do it all with extreme care, but by this stage, we know they’re willing to do things right.’
I shut up now and Jackson takes over.
He says, still figuring this out, ‘So anyone seeing that sword come out of that hole has to assume it’s Arthur’s sword. That seal box at Dinas Powys seems to confirm it. The vellum at Llanymawddwy seems to double-confirm it. The fact that Liddington Castle has long been fingered as a possible site for Mount Badon seems to treble-confirm it. Basically, this thing they’ve found, it is Arthur’s sword, it has to be.’
‘Yes.’
I think that’s only half the truth, in fact.
Establishing the provenance of the sword was always going to be the tough part. Yes, you can fake a sword to look old, but how do you prove the thing is Arthur’s sword?
You could hope to rely on academics, of course. The research community of which Katie is part. But how can those guys really get stuck in, if they don’t have an actual sword to analyse? They can form hypotheses, of course, but more hypotheticals is the absolute last thing that our thieves needed. They needed something mo
re definite than that. More certain. And in this case, they chose to rely on the sturdy common sense of the British police service.
Our press statements have already as good as confirmed that the sword was genuine. That it came out of that ritual shaft. That we believe, completely, in its Arthurian provenance.
I remember thinking, early on, The single thing that disturbs me most about this enquiry so far is the idea that we’re the intended audience: we, the police.
I think that what the thieves wanted us to do, we’ve done.
‘So what now?’ asks Jackson.
‘Well, two possibilities really, sir.’
He thinks.
Studies me.
Nods.
‘OK, option one,’ he says. ‘We reveal the existence of this side tunnel. We go public and say that this whole Arthurian thing was just a sham. A hoax, aimed at making a ton of money on the black market.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s good. That’s a good, attractive option. It means those thieves will have spent loads of money doing all this and we just make their product unsaleable. If we announce this thing is a fake, no one on earth will be stupid enough to buy it.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So if we do that, the thieves have wasted their time and money.’
‘And lots of it.’
‘Except then we don’t have anyone to arrest, do we?’
‘Well, maybe someone at the Cwmbran end.’ I say. ‘We could probably find out who hired that digger. Compare faces with the people behind the museum robbery. There’s an avenue there.’
‘And this guy with the stupid name—’
‘Alden Gheerbrant.’
‘Yes, him. I daresay you’d want another crack at him?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that’s option one.’
‘Yes.’
‘But,’ Jackson’s fingers tick off the negatives one by one, ‘We won’t have caught the guys trying to sell this sword. We won’t have the men who killed Gaynor Charteris. We won’t have the men who, presumably, paid Antony Wormold to kill John Oakeshott. And we won’t necessarily have the men who broke into the museum. I mean, if the gang comprises just your Gheerbrant fellow and maybe some Cwmbran mining types, then we get everyone, but we’d have to bet this conspiracy is broader than that.’
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 26
