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

by Harry Bingham

  I say, ‘Yes. If they know anything.’

  ‘They’re all in on this. It’s all one conspiracy.’

  ‘Right, but if I were Mr Moneybags, I’d think, “Mordred, yes, he knows how to handle himself under hostile police interrogation. But Gheerbrant? No. Never. So I’m not going to expose myself to him. I’ll operate only via guys I can trust.” Same thing with Yvain. Same thing with all the second-tier guys.’

  ‘OK, so we just hit Mordred hard. Tell him his only way to escape from some monster sentence is a whole ton of co-operation.’

  ‘What monster sentence? OK, in that cave, he made a threat to kill. That’s ten years maximum. But he wasn’t carrying any kind of weapon and he didn’t know the identity of the person he was threatening. He’ll say he was just messing around. That’s probably not even a jail sentence. And, yes, we can nail him on a fraud charge, but that’s still only a few years. This guy has been responsible for two deaths already, but can we prove it? To courtroom standard? I don’t think so.’

  I’m right, and everyone knows it.

  The mood, temporarily, is angry, frustrated. This whole operation, despite everything, still has a so-near-but-yet-so-far quality to it.

  Jackson suddenly grins. Sinks the last of his beer.

  ‘Katie,’ he says, ‘I think Fiona’s got a question she wants to ask you.’

  I do, yes.

  I say, ‘Look, Katie, we might need a bit longer here. We’d like to take our time building our case before we make any arrests.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But you’re not safe. So, with your permission, we’d like to take you into protective custody. It won’t be for long. It is voluntary. It will make you safe.’

  Katie has some questions, of course, but the basic gist is yes, OK.

  Yes to everything.

  Yes to protective custody. Yes to a long process of eliminating, or much reducing, her footprint on the web. Yes, to plainclothes detectives entering her houseshare in Cardiff and removing diaries, laptops, anything that could give any theoretical attackers useful clues to her wider life.

  There are a couple of minor wrinkles, but not big ones.

  She has a hospital appointment tomorrow. London, not Cardiff. She wants to attend that, if possible.

  Yes, no problems.

  And her parents. Can she see them while she’s in protective custody? They worry about her enough as it is.

  Answer: no, no way, sorry.

  So we dink things around.

  Katie and I will go straight from here to her parents’ place. We’ll get an IT guy from the Bedfordshire Police to help with the whole business of scrubbing Katie from the internet. We won’t be able to get it all done overnight, but we’ll make a good start. Get the rest done as fast as possible tomorrow.

  I’ll stay with Katie right up to the hospital appointment. After that, our protective custody types can take over. Waft her away until she’s safe.

  It’s a good arrangement. Although Katie won’t be totally secure until she’s in proper custody, it’s hard to see that Mordred will be able to find her in the dozen or so hours that lie ahead of us. After all, he and Yvain are both still clinking around in that cave right now – and neither of them know who the hell Katie is.

  Jones says, ‘Mike, before we run with this, I just need to hear from you that you’re confident with the surveillance.’

  Atkins: ‘Look, these things are never a hundred per cent. But we’ve got multiple vehicles at our disposal and a helicopter. And, remember, this pair must be feeling pretty secure right now. If we were police, why didn’t we arrest them? I’d guess these two will just drive home and go to bed.’

  He has that Metropolitan Police we-never-screw-up tone about him which is deeply comforting, until you remember that the Met screws up just as much as anyone else and maybe more.

  But we have a plan, and it’s a good one.

  We drink up.

  Pay.

  Go.

  45

  Katie’s parents’ house. A biggish place. Leaded windows, herringbone brick around a timber porch. Brass downlights. The whiff and scent of money.

  We’re met by Katie’s mother and father, forewarned of our arrival by a call from Katie. He’s in jeans, old T-shirt, bare feet. She’s in pyjamas and a lilac dressing gown. It’s now well past one in the morning.

  A little bustle of hot drinks and (for Katie) hugs and kisses and (for me) some how-do-you-dos and we’ve-heard-so-muches.

  There’s a copper there too, Danny Ingersoll. He’s manfully wearing not just a suit, but a tie, and shiny black shoes, and almost manages to look like his normal hours of work are two in the morning till God knows when.

  He has a laptop all wifi-ed up.

  The parents, both nice enough, get shooed upstairs to bed.

  Ingersoll and Katie start working on the internet stuff.

  Her Facebook page comes down first. She’s not on Twitter, not on Instagram. An old, little-used LinkedIn account is also vaped.

  But people, especially young, sociable and busy ones, leave a lot of traces online, and Katie is no exception.

  Working together, she and Ingersoll make lists, delete accounts, email webmasters, do what they have to do. Bit by bit, Katie starts to vanish from the web.

  I yawn.

  Over in Symonds Yat, Mordred and Yvain have got out of their handcuffs. They’re in their car heading, we guess, for London. SO15 have six cars and a traffic helicopter monitoring progress.

  There’s no news. The surveillance is easy.

  I yawn again.

  Ingersoll says, ‘Sarge, remind me again why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m needed for my kungfu ninja skills. Think of me as the ultimate bodyguard.’

  ‘Kung fu is Chinese,’ Ingersoll says. ‘Ninjas were Japanese.’

  I stare.

  He says, ‘And kung fu isn’t a martial art. It’s any practice requiring patience, energy and discipline.’

  I stare.

  Katie says, ‘I’ll show you your bedroom.’

  She does. A pale-blue room that reminds me, for no reason, of a mortuary at night. The unguarded dead. That deep, impenetrable sleep.

  I brought in an overnight bag from the car, so I’ve got toothbrush and things.

  I brush my teeth. Shower. Change.

  Sit on the edge of my pale-blue bed and call Jones.

  ‘Anything on the DNA yet?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘Fiona, it’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘The imaging. The mugshots. You’re going to tell me—’

  ‘Fiona, yes. We captured good quality video of both men. Mordred and Yvain. That’s all been downloaded and cleaned up. First thing in the morning, we’re going to start running it through the databases looking for a match.’

  ‘OK. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  I wonder where Jones is now. Perhaps he’s in bed, next to his wife, Elaine. I’ve only met her once, but she was surprisingly orange and wearing a shimmery dress that was one size too small. She seemed nice.

  ‘Did I wake you? Sorry.’

  ‘No, I’m in the office. Wouldn’t sleep tonight anyway.’

  ‘No.’

  He asks me how we’re doing at my end.

  I tell him we’re doing fine.

  Go to the window and look out.

  See a beech hedge under orange street lighting. An empty drive. One of those bits of front lawn that you have to have with a house like this.

  There are no black-jacketed bad guys creeping towards the house. No gleam of moonlight on gun barrel. No half-seen glimpse of night vision gear.

  I say, ‘Do we think we should get a squad car? To park outside?’

  ‘No. Why? Our boy Mordred hasn’t even arrived in London.’

  ‘OK.’

  We pause.

  Then I say, ‘Her surname’s Smith.’

  ‘Katie Smith. I know.’r />
  ‘I mean, it’s a hard to search name, isn’t it? There aren’t that many Alden Gheerbrants in the country, are there? But Katie Smiths, there must be thousands.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A pause.

  Then, ‘Go to sleep, Fiona. Stick around till you can hand Katie over. If anything important happens, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I don’t hang up.

  Nor does he.

  Then we both start speaking. But I’m a girl and I don’t have a terrible beard, so I win.

  I say, ‘Gheerbrant.’

  ‘Yes, I was thinking the same. We’ve got nothing to lose, so we may as well arrest him.’

  We talk it over, but the logic is sound. We arrest Gheerbrant. Charge him with conspiracy to murder.

  There’s a chance that simply charging the guy will make him tell us more than he has done already. But, in any event, the arrest will add to the pressure on Mordred. And the greater that pressure, the more urgent is his need to communicate with his boss or bosses. We only need to intercept one of those calls and we have, potentially, the entire gang in our nets.

  Jones says, ‘I’ll call Durham now. Get that moving.’

  I’d like to be there, of course. Outside Gheerbrant’s cottage, watching.

  The dawn knock. The startled face.

  And then – the squad car and the cuffs and the charge and a prison future that is endless and grey and high and empty.

  If it was anyone else, I’d probably say something. As it’s Jones, I don’t.

  He tells me again to go to bed.

  I go, gunlessly, to bed.

  Fall asleep and dream of nothing.

  46

  Wake.

  Pee. Do my teeth. Do all the things that regular humans do.

  Go downstairs.

  It’s nine o’clock. No Katie. No Ingersoll.

  Katie’s dad, Patrick, says, ‘Sleep well? Coffee? You’ll need some coffee.’

  That’s two questions and one untrue statement. Since I don’t answer any of them, he gives me a mug of coffee. Pushes milk at me.

  I add milk to the coffee, much as I would do if I were going to drink it.

  He tries to make me eat something. Keeps shouting the names of different types of breakfast food, as though if he only found the right one, I’d leap up and start babbling my desire for the foodstuff in question.

  It doesn’t happen.

  I say, untruthfully, ‘I’m fine with coffee.’

  Katie’s mother, Romilly, comes in. She chides her husband for not having got me anything to eat, then plays the name-the-foodstuff game with me all over again.

  My powers of resistance remain unbroken.

  She tells me, reprovingly, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. She cites no evidence for this assertion.

  I sip my coffee, or pretend to.

  Patrick wears blue jeans, brown shoes and a pale-pink shirt. Romilly wears a pale-blue jumper over a nice suede skirt. They both look like Katie, in one way. She looks, as much as most people do, like her parents’ child.

  But also not. The braided, pierced, tattooed warrior queen who is my friend doesn’t altogether belong here, in the midst of this quiet prosperity. I can understand why she wants to live independently for as long as she can. It’s not about whether she loves her parents – she does – it’s about being her. Being her and staying her, to the very end.

  I wave my phone. ‘Sorry, do you mind?’

  I call Ingersoll.

  He answers on the fourth ring.

  I say who I am. Also: ‘Ninjas. Why wouldn’t they use kung fu? I mean, you’re allowed to punch somebody even if some other country invented punching.’

  He tells me that, yes, the original sixteenth-century ninjas probably did use versions of kung fu. Also tells me that, no, you’re not actually allowed to punch people.

  ‘Yes, I’d heard something like that,’ I say.

  He tells me they got on well last night. Should be fine without her this morning. ‘I’ll call if I need anything. Get her to keep checking messages, but apart from that, she can just have a nice morning at home.’

  I sign off.

  It’s stupid, but I have this feeling I should be checking the perimeter. Check locks. Door frames. Window catches.

  I say to her parents, ‘Katie’s still asleep, is she? You haven’t seen her this morning?’

  Answer yes and no respectively.

  Stupid feeling.

  Stupid jitters.

  Beech hedges and kung fu ninjas.

  Because I’m feeling twitchy, I do check all ground floor doors and windows for sign of forced entry.

  Nothing. Stupid.

  Nothing to see here. Move on.

  I check my emails.

  A few things, but just two that matter. Both from Bleddyn Jones.

  The first one is headed, ‘Subject: FFS!!!!’

  For Fuck’s Sake. And a girlishly excitable use of the exclamation mark. Not his normal style.

  The body of the message forwards on an email from SO15 in London.

  ‘Subjects temporarily lost. Subjects deployed extensive and sophisticated surveillance evasion techniques on London Underground etc. Not possible to maintain contact. Descriptions issued to all Met officers. Will update soonest.’

  For.

  Fuck’s.

  Sake.

  These arsey, up-themselves Met types. They’re all ‘leave it to us, we’re the FUCKING MET,’ and what you get is a bunch of phonies who screw up the one actually important thing in all of this. If we’d known that ‘we’ll follow these boys no matter what’ actually had the invisible rider, ‘unless they happen to take a Tube train,’ we would have just arrested the buggers when we had them.

  For.

  Fuck’s.

  Sake.

  Jones’s use of exclamation marks was, if anything, restrained.

  A second email too. ‘Subject: Gheerbrant.’

  It tells me that a small team led by Paul McGinn went to arrest Alden Gheerbrant on a charge of conspiracy to murder. The team arrived at six in the morning. Gheerbrant’s cottage was quiet, but there was a light on in the kitchen. His car was parked directly outside.

  McGinn knocked. Nicely at first, then a classic police pounding. ‘We’re here. You’re fucked. Now open up.’

  No answer.

  So they forced the door. Steel ram, no messing.

  And found – Gheerbrant.

  The man offered no comment. No resistance. Not even a mild oh of surprise.

  Offered nothing but a slow dangle. Noose around his neck. Ankles a few inches from the floor.

  And, I say ‘noose’, but that isn’t really technically correct. A proper hangman’s noose creates a fast-slipping rope and a heavy knot nestled at the base of the neck. Combine those things with enough of a drop, and the victim isn’t strangled, they have their neck broken. One quick snap and it’s done.

  Jones’s email links to the crime scene pictures themselves. Over-exposed snaps with cruel lighting. Electric glare and jagged shadows.

  And the noose isn’t a proper one. It’s an ordinary slip-knot, crudely tied. The sort of thing which delivers slow strangulation. A fish flapping in the unbreathable air.

  Gheerbrant was a weapons guy. He knew about these things. If he’d chosen to kill himself, he’d have known the right knot.

  But also, probably, he wouldn’t have managed to stick a sword through his belly. Entering at the front, just below the sternum. Plunged through, all the way through, to exit at his back, in a messy spew of bone and blood and spinal fluid.

  The man’s rectal temperature was the same as ambient, which means he’s been dead a fair while, which means he was killed before Mordred and Yvain left that cave. Since Mordred certainly didn’t give any orders while he was with us, that meant that he either ordered the hit beforehand or the instruction came from somebody else.

  There’s a whole lot of blah in Jones’s email, wh
ich I can’t read right now.

  It’s bad news and I’m not thinking straight, so I just rotate through the corpse photos. View them repetitively. Click, click, click. Round in a circle.

  Romilly Smith glances over my shoulder and looks away with a sharp inbreath.

  I say, ‘Mrs Smith, can you just show me Katie’s bedroom, please? I just want to . . . just want to . . .’

  Check on her.

  We go upstairs.

  A white Georgian-style door in this not-exactly-Georgian house.

  Open it quietly. Not wanting to wake the woman inside.

  But I could open it with a fanfare of trumpets and a parade of African drummers. Those things, and acrobats and dancers and elephants, and I still wouldn’t wake Katie, because she isn’t there.

  ‘Oh, that’s strange,’ says Romilly, who really, really, really hasn’t got this thing. ‘I wonder where—’

  We yell through the house. The garden. Open bathroom doors without knocking.

  No Katie.

  Romilly and Patrick start the journey that will take them from mild perplexity to outright panic. I can’t advise them that things will be all right. They’re not looking very fucking all right.

  I call Katie.

  The call goes straight through to voicemail.

  Call Jones. Get his voicemail too. Ask him to ping Katie’s phone. Get a read on its local area. Then Ingersoll.

  Has he, by chance, got Katie with him?

  He has not.

  Can he get an alert out to all officers? Very high risk, threat to welfare, MisPer. Missing person.

  Yes. He’s on it.

  Fuck.

  Think.

  Call Bowen.

  He answers, thank heaven.

  I tell him that Katie’s missing. Say, ‘Look, I don’t think they know anything about you, but I thought Katie was pretty much safe too. I ask if he’s OK hiding out somewhere for a while.

  He says, ‘No, I’m sorry, but I’ve got parishioners who need me. And I can’t help remembering that Jesus Christ didn’t leave the people who needed him, no matter what the risk.’

  I want to argue with that. Jesus Christ was founding a world religion. Bowen runs a few half-arsed parishes in a remote bit of Wales. But I don’t quibble. This is his territory and maybe he’s right.