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

by Harry Bingham

  I think we can pretty much prove the conspiracy is larger than that, in fact, but I don’t bother to say so.

  Instead, I just say, ‘Yes.’

  Yes to Jackson’s list of objections. Yes to the thinking that lies behind it.

  Jackson: ‘Just to be clear, I’m not ruling out option one.’

  My face doesn’t do much at that. It certainly doesn’t say anything.

  Jackson says, sharply, ‘Fiona?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I heard you. Option one – the thing about letting the criminals get away with everything – that’s still under urgent consideration.’

  Jackson doesn’t quite smile, but his crags soften just a little. Just briefly.

  Then he hefts my sword again.

  Battle-scarred it may be, but it’s still four feet of sharp steel in my living room.

  A dangerous blade. A wicked blade. A killing blade.

  ‘Option two,’ says Jackson.

  ‘Yes, sir. Option Two.’

  ‘It would be more fun, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not about fun, sir. It’s about doing our job.’

  Jackson parries a thrust from an imaginary attacker, then twists his blade so he just manages to catch the attacker in the thigh.

  A flesh wound. Non-lethal.

  He stands back, holding the sword out, breathing through his mouth, ready for the next assault.

  He does that, grinning at my primness.

  ‘We can do our job and have some fun.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The attacker returns. Leaps at Jackson, but ends up with a belly full of Caledfwlch and dies gurgling on my carpet.

  Jackson stands with the point of the sword at the imaginary attacker’s throat. Waits till the last gurgle is fully gurgled.

  ‘Option two,’ he says. ‘How far have you got with that?’

  I do a sort of half-shrug. One that takes in the sword in my living room. The Agora listing. The price tag of sixty million dollars.

  I’ve got that far: that’s what my shrug says.

  ‘You’ve had no contact?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But you’re thinking that the thieves will contact you?’

  ‘I think they have to. If two people are selling Caledfwlch, then neither sword is worth anything. They have to get mine off the market.’

  ‘And when they make contact?’

  ‘Don’t know. Haven’t really thought about that part.’

  ‘Well, I’d say they’ve got two options themselves. The thieves I mean. They could pay you to take your sword off the market. Or they could kill you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you know, what with being thieves and murderers and all, they’d probably go with the whole killing-you alternative, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Well!’ I actually raise my hands at that. Not a gesture of surrender. More of a do-I-really-have-to-do-everything-around-here? thing. And when my hands have finished waving around, I add some words by way of garnish, ‘They can’t just kill me. That wouldn’t remove that listing on Agora. And anyway. You know. We’re the police. We’re allowed guns and everything.’

  Jackson nods, exactly as he would have done if we were in the process of making a sensible arrangement. A good, solid, professional plan.

  He checks my living room to see if any more Dark Age warriors are about to leap at him, but decides we’re OK. He lays Caledfwlch gently down.

  ‘How much of this does DI Jones actually know?’

  ‘He and I have had a communication problem, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He’s a perfectly fine officer, Fiona. Very safe pair of hands.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And look, I’ve had a look in your damn file. Pretty much everything he says about you is spot on. Good, accurate, honest feedback.’

  ‘I know.’

  There’s a long pause.

  Either the light has moved, or Jackson has, but a stray beam of light catches on one of the red glass rubies in the sword’s hilt and throws a dart of red up at Jackson’s eye. He doesn’t blink or move away.

  I say, ‘That beard. DI Jones’s beard.’ I can’t bring myself to describe it in detail, but my hands do a kind of spidery creep around my chin.

  ‘You don’t like his beard?’

  ‘No, I don’t like his beard.’

  ‘It’s not a good one.’

  ‘No.’

  I think Jackson should probably tell me that dislike of a beard is not a reason to disobey a commanding officer. If he did choose to say that, I’d be obliged to agree, but he doesn’t.

  And then – well, I don’t know.

  Nothing changes. The light still burns red in Jackson’s eye.

  Caledfwlch lies quiet on my floor.

  The body of an imaginary attacker drips the last of its life-blood into my living-room carpet.

  And Jackson laughs. A deep-bottomed, wide-chested laugh, that’s born of the Welsh hills, at home on the rugby field and the parade ground.

  ‘Bloody hell, Fiona,’ he says. ‘It’s good to be back.’

  42

  The email comes later that same morning.

  It’s not a regular email and it doesn’t come to any of my regular addresses. Instead it comes to my GuerrillaMail account, a site that scrambles an already random email address and deletes all unread messages after just one hour.

  The message reads: ‘You don’t have Excalibur. Remove your listing. Mordred.’

  Mordred: Arthur’s nephew or bastard son, depending on which myth you believe. In most versions of the myth, he’s a traitor too. The man responsible for Arthur’s death.

  His address, like mine, is untraceable.

  I email back, ‘Nor do you. Remove yours. Gwenhwyfar.’

  Then tramp up to Jackson’s office with my laptop.

  My Caledfwlch lies under a tartan blanket on Jackson’s sofa. The blanket is not as clean as it might be and smells more than a little of dog.

  I poke at it disapprovingly.

  I say, ‘You should at least have washed the blanket.’

  ‘If it’s good enough for my dog, it’s good enough for your sword.’

  ‘It’s my Caledfwlch. I might just sell it.’

  ‘And I might just prosecute you. Fraud by false representation. I’m thinking, what, maybe five years? I’ll push for the maximum anyway. The maximum maximum maximum maximum.’

  An incoming email interrupts our valuable dialogue.

  ‘Please send video of your sword cutting into the front page of today’s Times. You have thirty minutes. Mordred.’

  We don’t have a Times to hand. We have a Western Mail, so we go with that.

  Jackson calls down to Bleddyn Jones, gets him to come up.

  Jackson has already briefed Jones. Jones doesn’t particularly like the direction things have taken, but he’s a pro. He doesn’t sulk.

  Anyway.

  Jackson lays the paper out on his sofa and thrashes it with the sword. I video him do it.

  The thing about cutting a newspaper to shreds is because our counterparts want to check we have a real sword, not just something Photoshopped into existence. A video of a sword thrashing around with today’s newspaper should do the trick.

  We check the video, then send it.

  My message reads, ‘Here’s the video. If you want to see our spectroscopy data, our radiocarbon data, or anything else, please ask. You’ll note that the jet beads on our sword are highly consistent with those recently found at Dinas Powys, thus confirming the authenticity of this exceptional piece. Your sword is a modern fake. Please remove your listing. Gwenhwyfar.’

  We all stare at the laptop.

  It does nothing.

  Then Jones says, ‘I’ve got news for you. It’s just come in. Look at this.’

  He shows us a picture of Dark Hair guy.

  The picture isn’t one I’ve seen before. It doesn’t come from the museum.

  Jones: ‘OK, so I sent a team out to that Cwmbran plant hire plac
e. Showed them some pictures. And we’ve got an identification. This man is Ivor Williams. He’s a project manager at some kind of tunnelling company.’

  He passes us the company brochure. They do pipe jacking, shaft sinking, auger boring, sheet piling, timber headings, anything. If you wanted to tunnel silently into a museum, Ivor Williams would be the man to do it.

  One of the services offered by the company is ‘No disturb excavation’. The text underneath begins, ‘In sites of exceptional scientific or historical interest, it may be necessary to complete works with minimal impact on the sub-soil environment. Our group is the European leader at such excavation . . .’

  I place my finger on the text.

  I say, ‘That side-tunnel. The one that came into the shaft at Liddington Castle.’

  Jackson says, ‘“No Disturb Excavation”. Bloody hell. The things people can do.’

  Jones scowls, like he’s been playing a game where no one told him the rules up front.

  He says, ‘Williams isn’t present at his home address. Obviously we’ve circulated his ID. We’re looking through his known contacts now. See if we can locate the two accomplices.’

  That’s good.

  Very good.

  For the first time in this case, it feels like we’re ahead of the curve, not lagging some long distance behind it. And unless Williams has buggered off for good to some shady criminal paradise in South America, we’ll pick him up before too long.

  Still my laptop does nothing.

  Jones and Jackson crawl around picking up tattered bits of the Western Mail. As the junior officer present, I should probably be helping, but I give them my emphatic – if silent – moral support instead.

  Then – finally – the laptop talks to us.

  ‘How much to delete your listing? Mordred.’

  I stare at my commanding officers.

  Jones: ‘I don’t know. A million? Two million?’

  Jackson: ‘Five?’

  I type, ‘Twenty million dollars. Bitcoin equivalent. Gwenhwyfar.’

  Hit send.

  Say, ‘You think too small. That’s your problem.’

  43

  The same day. Evening.

  Lord’s Wood, the Doward.

  A rocky, wooded landscape. Some low cliffs, some sharp inclines.

  Another hill fort, except that this one has signs of human habitation going back at least ten thousand years. There are flint tools here. Mammoth bones.

  Katie sits on a rock in the golden glow of the setting sun. She’s dressed in black, top to toe. Black jeans. Black boots. A long-sleeved black T-shirt. I’m in the same outfit, more or less.

  I say, ‘You OK?’

  Katie shrugs. She’s dying rapidly of an incurable illness so, no, she’s not OK but she shrugs. Says, ‘Fine.’

  The rock here has the warmth of captured sunlight, warmer now than the air around us. Behind us, there stands a low cliff. At its base, the mouth of a cave, King Arthur’s Cave. It comprises just two main chambers, the largest about twenty-five feet across. It is, supposedly, where Vortigern, a king of the Britons and contemporary of Arthur’s, fought his last battle.

  Above us, there’s a stumble of boot on stone. A skitter of falling pebbles.

  A man appears.

  Vaguely military boots. Jeans. Old flannel shirt.

  Shotgun.

  This is Mike Atkins. A former paratrooper, now working for SO15, the Met’s specialist counter-terrorism unit. We’re not dealing with terrorists here, but SO15 is as fuck-off-scary as British policing ever gets, so we asked for their help and they said yes.

  Atkins handles the gun like he knows how to use it.

  ‘Our friends are here,’ he tells us. ‘Two of them.’

  Our friends.

  About two o’clock this afternoon, Mordred emailed to offer ten million for the sword, but demanded to see it first. I said no to the ten million, but yes to the inspection. Time and place of my choosing. Maximum of two people. No weapons of any kind. No phones or radios. No electronics.

  Mordred accepted those terms.

  I told him to go immediately to Hereford, wait there for further instructions. Then, forty minutes ago, I told him where I was. Told him to arrive within the hour or any deal would be off.

  He emailed back: ‘OK.’

  Katie and I take ourselves into the cave. We have ski masks in thin black cotton and put them on. The damn things make us look like movie bad guys, but it’s better to be safe. Atkins pulls a mask on too.

  In the woods beyond the cave, Atkins has a further six colleagues. Hidden. Silent. Watching. Armed. A microphone embedded in Atkins’s collar broadcasts an audio feed to each of them.

  Silence. Then the sound of footsteps.

  Two men come in to view.

  One is dressed much as Atkins is. An old reddish shirt worn over jeans. The other wears a pale-blue shirt and chinos. The shirt looks like the sort of thing that would be more comfortable in an office than in the woods above Symonds Yat. Either way, no man carries a weapon, or at least none that I can see.

  ‘Stop.’ Atkins’s command lies as much in the movement of his shotgun as it does in the word.

  The men stop.

  He tosses them a couple of eye masks, the kind of thing you use to get sleep on aeroplanes.

  The two men put them on.

  Then – nothing.

  The men just stand, blindfolded. Atkins stands a few yards away, covering them with his gun.

  I scan the two men through my binoculars. Ski mask or not, I wouldn’t want to be around if either of these two men saw me in the museum. But these two are unknown to me.

  I pass the glasses to Katie.

  She studies the men. She has a real stillness to her at times. The stillness of the hunter. The warrior.

  These men are here to buy a fake antiquity, which presumably means that at least one of the two has some experience in antiquities. And, since the circle of possible experts is not that wide, that person must have a reasonable chance of knowing Katie.

  But she studies the men, drops the glasses and shakes her head.

  ‘OK?’ I ask her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I approach the two men. Frisk them.

  That word, frisk, somehow implies something brisk and almost light-hearted, but I’m not brisk and not light-hearted.

  Check calves for hidden blades. Check thighs and groins. Remove belts. Run my fingers on the inside of waistbands. The blue-shirted guy has a glasses case in his shirt pocket. There are reading glasses inside. Neither they nor the case itself look dodgy to me.

  But I continue. Check torsos, arms and armpits. The inside of each collar. Run my hands through their hair. Check their mouths.

  Have them, still blindfolded, remove their shoes, so I can inspect the soles, the inners.

  It sounds ridiculous. Too much. But a razor blade, or half a blade even, can do enough damage if used fast and well, and electronics are so small these days you can conceal them almost anywhere.

  Besides, I’m scared of these people. They, or their acolytes, killed Gaynor Charteris. They paid the poor fool, Wormold, to stick his knife into Oakeshott’s libidinous ribs. If they realise we’re serious and competent, the risk of something going horribly wrong is reduced.

  ‘OK. You can remove your masks.’

  The men do, blinking and re-orienting themselves in this glowing evening light.

  The guy with the red shirt looks about mid-thirties. Six foot one or two. Fit and strong. Short sandy hair. Pale eyes. Looks wholly unbothered by this situation. The search. The mask. The shotgun.

  The man reeks of alpha-male. He knows it too and that knowledge only makes him reek the more.

  His buddy, the blue-shirted guy is older, maybe fifty. Podgy. Grey hair, not that tidy.

  I think, no, that blue shirt doesn’t belong in an office, exactly. It belongs in a study. An academic’s book-lined study, of the sort that
Gheerbrant had, the sort that Oakeshott had.

  I stick out my hand. Say to the younger guy, ‘Mordred.’

  We shake hands.

  Then the older guy.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘I am – oh, I did not know we would do this – so I must say, I suppose, I am Yvain.’

  Yvain’s accent is pure French, which surprises me, and then quickly doesn’t. When we interviewed all those academics – the archaeologists, the historians – we confined our search to British universities, British institutions. Yvain’s accent tells me that we needed to roam more widely.

  ‘Yvain, Mordred.’ I wave them towards the cave.

  We enter.

  In the centre of the larger chamber, we’ve got three battery-operated lanterns. Some plastic milk crates covered over with a black felt cloth. And on the cloth, glowing like a diamond, our Caledfwlch.

  Katie sits on a low camping stool at the centre of our little table. Fingertips spread lightly on the cloth.

  She looks, more than ever, like a warrior queen.

  Regal, fierce, dying.

  And I think, no I was never a real Guinevere. Never the Frehines Gwenhwyfar I claimed to be. Katie, here, now: she is our real Guinevere, that doomed princess.

  I say, ‘Mordred, this is Gwenhwyfar. You can call me Gwenhwyfach.’

  Gwenhwyfach: the queen’s sister. The dart of Katie’s grey-blue eyes beneath her mask tells me she likes her new title.

  Yvain approaches the sword.

  ‘This is it? Oh, it is good.’ He gets his glasses case out. ‘May I?’

  Puts his glasses on and inspects up close. Katie passes him a hand-held magnifier with built-in lighting. The sort of thing that jewellers use.

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  He inspects the sword up close. The edge on the blade. The multiple dings. The bending. The jet beads. The gold wire on pommel and hilt. The stamp of the bear-and-crown image at the base. The horn. The glass. Everything.

  He asks questions too. ‘This iron. It looks OK. Where did you . . .’

  Katie says, ‘We took iron from Roman and early Celtic antiquities found in south Wales. Reworked it using a furnace fired by hardwoods native to the area. Worked the material by hand using period-accurate tools. Made some use of pattern welding techniques, but nothing inconsistent with a fifth-century sword. The damage done to the weapon was done by striking it with other period-authentic objects. We induced an accelerated rust process using more than fifty applications of household vinegar and hydrogen peroxide, both ingredients which will degrade so rapidly as to be already undetectable. The degree of bending on the blade here was calculated in accordance with recent research on the performance of these kinds of blades in battle.’