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

by Harry Bingham

  The door opens straight into a farmhouse kitchen. Slate floor. Two-oven range cooker. Pine table. The place mostly has the equipment and level of furnishing you’d expect from a rental place, except this one has a Krups coffee machine that looks glossily expensive and which, I expect, travelled here from Nantes.

  Dad throws open a door. A living room, with broad views down the valley. Old sofa in ochre linen. An armchair. Books.

  I say, ‘He’ll probably be asleep. He didn’t sleep last night.’

  I say, sort of assuming that my words will be interpreted as, ‘Let’s go upstairs and seize our quarry while he is asleep and undefended.’

  That’s not, however, how my dad chooses to hear them.

  He says, ‘Oh, so we’ve got some time then. George, I’m gasping. Do you fancy a coffee? Imagine! A machine like that in a place like this! Things change, don’t they? I remember when . . .’

  He starts to tell Bowen random anecdotes from his rough Tiger Bay past.

  Starts making coffee.

  I doubt if he’s ever used a coffee machine before. It’s not that he doesn’t drink it, just somehow his life works out that other people bring him drinks. But he bashes merrily around. Opening drawers, pressing buttons, figuring things out. ‘What’s this – a frother, eh? My goodness, the things they think of. George, there’s milk in the fridge is there? Cups. What’s this? Maybe I need to tamp it down. Like that, what do you think? That’s better. Yes, there we go.’

  He makes coffee. Three cups.

  Bowen finds milk. A jug. Brings it over.

  From up above: footsteps.

  Bowen and I exchange glances. Check our weapons.

  I say, ‘Absolutely no shooting, OK? In self-defence, yes, but only if we absolutely have to.’

  Bowen is singing loud from the same hymn sheet, but there’s no reaction from Dad.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Oh yes, love, don’t worry about all that.’

  His gun is still in his pocket. Caledfwlch on the table. His hands are busy with jugs and milk foamers.

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  Then a door opens.

  M. Yves de Boissieu. Yvain. Mordred’s buddy.

  Two guns point at his chest as he makes his entrance, but he isn’t armed. He is wearing pyjamas, the old-fashioned sort. Blue-striped, with a collar, and buttons, and red piping. Those things and a grey dressing gown, loosely tied.

  ‘Yves, isn’t it?’ yells my dad. ‘I’m Tom. Tom Griffiths. I was just making coffee. Do you want some? Never worked one of these things before, but I already want one.’

  De Boissieu’s eyes are startled and afraid.

  He’s also confused. He doesn’t know whether to trust the message of the guns, or the message of the coffee. He doesn’t know why Caledfwlch is on the table. Doesn’t know how I found my way to his house or what lies in store.

  It’s more than possible – probable, in fact – that he doesn’t know about the abduction of Kay or Katie. If I were Mordred, I’d keep things like that need-to-know only.

  ‘Have a seat there. No, no, there, that one. Make yourself comfortable. I mean, this is your house, isn’t it? We woke you. Least we can do is look after you.’

  Dad directs de Boissieu to a wooden armchair, then gestures at Bowen to pass his bag. Burrows around for some cable ties.

  ‘Good things these are. We never used to use ’em. Used to use string and bits of rope mostly. Then they brought out those tapes, gaffer tapes and that, but probably we could have used these cable things all along. Just popped into an electrical place. Bought a few dozen. Easy. Never thought of it, though. People didn’t back then.’

  Dad ties de Boissieu to the chair. Wrists. Ankles. Elbows.

  He doesn’t worry too much about keeping de Boissieu comfortable.

  Nor do I.

  ‘There. That’s a tidy job, eh? Isn’t it? I should be a sparky, shouldn’t I? Go and get my City and Guilds certificate.’

  He froths some milk.

  Gives coffee to Bowen. To me. One for him.

  To de Boissieu, he says, ‘Do you want some? We can hold the cup for you.’

  De Boissieu’s eyes say no.

  The cable ties have more or less solved the guns vs. coffee dilemma. Tipped the balance in favour of the former.

  It isn’t true, I think, that fear has a smell, but it does, certainly, have an atmosphere. Something sour and hunkered down and coloured at the edges with sweat and piss.

  ‘That’s a proper good cup of coffee, isn’t it, Fi, love?’

  I say, because I know what he’s thinking, ‘It’s Mam’s birthday soon. We could go halves.’

  ‘Yes, go halves. Done! How much is a thing like that, Yves? Expensive, I bet.’

  At first de Boissieu doesn’t answer. He can’t believe that Dad actually wants to know. But that’s an error. Dad genuinely does. Persists till he gets the answer.

  Three hundred and fifty euros. Dad wants an answer in sterling. De Boissieu translates, roughly, into sterling.

  ‘Now look, Yves, you’ve been really helpful, but you know who this is?’

  He points at me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you’re not really thinking there, are you? I’m Tom Griffiths, I told you that. And this here is Fiona, my daughter. You heard me calling her Fi. So Fi – Fiona, you’re probably capable of working that out aren’t you? Fiona Griffiths. My daughter. Also a police officer. A rising star in the South Wales force. That’s right, dear, isn’t it? I can say that, can’t I?’

  My nod tells him he can.

  He looks at de Boissieu, whose fear is rising now, if possible.

  He is hardly the most professional of criminals, but he knows the police don’t operate with cable ties and coffee machines. He doesn’t know what all this is. I’m not totally sure that I do.

  ‘So, Tom Griffiths. My daughter, Fiona. And this is – well, he’s a man of the cloth, you can see that, can’t you? Never go anywhere without a vicar, I say. Never know when you might need one. Now, Yves, maybe you can tell me the name of your friend Mordred. His real name, obviously.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. He always called himself Mordred.’

  ‘I’m not going to like that answer. You know that.’

  De Boissieu, however, is obviously telling the truth. We ask the same question three different ways, but get the same answer every time.

  There’s a pause in the room. An empty space.

  De Boissieu’s anxiety is at fever pitch.

  Dad keeps walking in and out of his range of vision. Sometimes fingering Caledfwlch. Sometimes drinking coffee. Sometimes standing behind de Boissieu and rocking his chair, drumming on the back, playing with it.

  I say to de Boissieu, ‘Your weapons specialist. What was his name, please?’

  ‘Weapons? Our guy. Uther. We call him Uther.’

  Uther, for Uther Pendragon. Arthur’s father.

  I say, ‘That’s not clever, Yves. I’d like you to give me his real name.’

  While I never actually expected de Boissieu to know Mordred’s true identity, de Boissieu and Gheerbrant were fellow academics, both farming different parts of the same historical field. I just don’t believe they didn’t know each other, didn’t have some kind of connection outside this conspiracy.

  De Boissieu instantly corrects his answer. ‘He is Alden Gheerbrant. He works in Durham. On Dark Age weapons and this, he is very good. Best in his subject.’

  He says that last word the French way, sujet. I like that. Like that little loss of control.

  I say, ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Was very good. Was the best in his subject.’

  I show him the crime scene photos.

  Gheerbrant a-dangle in his own living room.

  Gheerbrant pierced by his own sword.

  Blood and stomach contents leaking at the front. Blood and spinal fluid leaking at the back.

  ‘Do you know who did this?’

 
‘No. No, really. This thing, is terrible.’

  ‘You don’t know who did this?’

  ‘No, no. I tell you this. I would never . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘You do know, though, don’t you? I mean, you can easily guess.’

  De Boissieu licks his lips. He wants water. His mouth looks and sounds painfully dry.

  He says, ‘It is Mordred, I suppose. Him or . . .’

  ‘He gave the order, didn’t he? Someone else executed the instruction, but Mordred gave the order.’

  ‘Yes. I think.’

  ‘That’s why you came to the cave, not Gheerbrant. You weren’t the right guy. He was. But Mordred took it into his head that Gheerbrant had said too much under police interrogation and this was the result.’

  De Boissieu’s lips move.

  This, normally, is where people would be touching their faces. Self-comforting. Little strokes of reassurance.

  Bound as he is, the man can’t do that.

  I study him.

  The trick to most confessions is flipping the suspect. At the outset, they are most worried about releasing secrets to a police officer. So knotted with worry, indeed, that they can sometimes hardly speak. Barely even ask for water.

  You can bash away at those silences, but you won’t get anywhere until the suspect comes to believe that co-operating is his least-worst option. That, shitty though a prison future might be, worse things are possible.

  I say, ‘Gheerbrant is the third one of your colleagues to die. You know that?’

  He nods.

  ‘What do you think Mordred intends for you?’

  ‘No, no. I don’t think . . . I don’t think . . .’

  ‘You think Mordred is a nice guy? That’s what you think?’

  His dry lips and chapped silence tell me no. That’s not what he thinks.

  ‘Mordred will wait till he’s got his money, then he’ll kill anyone he thinks could betray him. That will include you. Gaynor Charteris was decapitated. John Oakeshott was stabbed and thrown into a canal. Alden Gheerbrant was hanged and stabbed. What do you think he’ll choose for you? What method?’

  De Boissieur’s answer isn’t verbal, but the ammoniac smell of urine and a darkening stain at his crotch tells me our message is getting through.

  ‘How does Mordred get in touch with you? Phone? Email? What?’

  By phone is the answer. De Boissieu’s language is more broken now and he has difficulty explaining the term ‘pay-as-you-go’. But his answer is as I expected. I ask where I can find his phones. His regular smartphone and his cheapie pay-as-you-go one.

  He tells me. The smartphone is by his bed. The other one is under a floorboard in the spare bedroom. It’s not something we couldn’t have found, but it is something we mightn’t have found fast.

  We poke around the house a bit. No sign of Kay or Katie, but Mordred would have been nuts to keep them here.

  I come down with the phones. Get up call logs. The smartphone log is full of calls to France, to Switzerland, to Bangor, to Oxford. To all the sorts of places you’d expect a guy like de Boissieu to be phoning.

  The other one has made only one call recently and received two. The counterparty was the same in each case.

  I hold the screen where de Boissieu can see it.

  ‘This number. It’s Mordred, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now this call, the one you made, what was that about?’

  I get him to tell me the basic contents of each call. Where it was made and when. Not because I need to know, but because I want to be sure he’s not just saying what I want to hear.

  When I’m happy, I call Jones.

  Give him Mordred’s number and say, ‘I need you to ping it, please.’

  There’s a short, Jonesian hesitation at that.

  Yes, we can force mobile phone companies to ‘ping’ a specific handset and thereby obtain knowledge of the phone’s approximate location. And, yes, we can do that without specific authorisation from a judge. That said, only a handful of officers in South Wales are empowered to make the request and that means there’s normally a whole lot of paperworky blah involved before the Wise and the Great are satisfied. Jones knows all that but, bless the man, he’s beginning to get the hang of working with me.

  He says, ‘This is important, is it, Fiona?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m convinced it’s critical to the rescue of our two abductees.’

  ‘And, I expect, this would be a highly time-critical issue, wouldn’t it?’

  He’s prompting my answer, in effect, telling me what I’m meant to say.

  I already know, of course – I have a Black Belt and Higher Diploma in the Art and Science of Paperwork Evasion – but I respond happily. Give him all the ‘highly criticals’ and ‘serious risk to lifes’ that he needs.

  Jones says, OK, he’ll get on to it.

  I say, ‘And the whole triangulation thing, please. I don’t just want the mast location.’

  ‘Fine.’

  We ring off.

  Triangulation: phones will, in most locations, be able to ‘talk’ to more than one phone mast and the phone company can measure the strength of the signal at each mast. By comparing signal strengths and triangulating directions, we can get a pretty good sense of where the handset actually lies. The data doesn’t usually yield a specific house location, but it gives us the broad area, to within two or three hundred metres.

  That’s not enough. In all likelihood, that’s not enough.

  I say to de Boissieu.

  ‘I am a police officer. When we are finished here, I will call my colleagues and you will be arrested on a charge of conspiracy to murder. That charge carries a potential life sentence.’

  He starts to babble. Says he never wanted anyone to die.

  I tell him to shut up.

  He doesn’t hear or can’t. In any case, he continues to babble.

  Dad, without even appearing to move all that much, slaps the man so hard it’s almost like a physical detonation. De Boissieu’s head jerks so violently, I’m briefly worried that he could have dislocated something.

  I have never in my life seen a harder blow.

  There is, I think, a fast-dying echo. Then nothing. A moment of stillness. Bowen, de Boissieu and I try to re reorient ourselves in this altered world.

  And into that little pond of silence, Dad says, at no more than conversational tone, ‘Yves, if my daughter asks you to shut up, you shut up. If she asks you a yes/no question, you answer with a yes or a no. That’s clear, isn’t it, Yves? I mean, you’ve got a lot of book learning. You can understand a simple thing like that, can’t you?’

  He says yes, or croaks it.

  I glance at Bowen, whose gaze holds steady. He won’t let things go further, I think, but he’s not too fussed about a single slap.

  I continue, ‘Now, a judge has considerable discretion over sentencing, and prosecutors have considerable discretion about what charge they choose to bring. So if you’re smart, you’ll do everything you can to co-operate, starting now. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And I start.

  A debrief. If we were doing this police-style, we’d need to arrest the guy, charge him, let the bastard get a lawyer, brief the lawyer, then faddle around with the niceties of a recorded interrogation.

  Ordinarily, that’s the right and only way to do it. But now isn’t ordinary. We need speed and we need results. If that calls for guns, cable ties and the waft of fear, then so be it.

  And the fact is that, though de Boissieu thinks he knows nothing, he knows more than he realises. People always do.

  Car: the first time he met Mordred he’s fairly sure the guy was driving a silver Mercedes. ‘The key. He have the key with the Mercedes symbol.’

  Clothes: almost always smart. Suit and tie. Polished shoes. That night in the cave was the first time he’d seen Mordred dressed down.

  Glasses: never.

  Arthur and archaeology: does Mordred actu
ally know anything about these things, or is he just a crook setting up a scam? Answer, yes, definitely, Mordred knows plenty about the sujet. ‘He is not a professional, I don’t think. But one time, he have a letter published in a journal. He was very happy about this.’

  ‘Which journal?’

  ‘I don’t know. So sorry.’

  ‘What was the letter about? What subject?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘The date?’

  We have to fuss around there, but get a date in spring 2015, March or April approximately.

  I look at Bowen.

  ‘George, this is your field. Early medieval journals that will print letters from amateurs. What are we looking at?’

  ‘Gosh, well . . .’ He starts to name journals. The Journal of Dark Age History. Medievalia. The Journal of the Royal Historical Society. A couple of others.

  I say to de Boissieu. ‘You have access, yes? You can access those journals from your computer here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He gives us the login bits that we need.

  Bowen gets to work. Sits at the computer. Starts printing letters and articles.

  Jones calls.

  ‘We’ve tried to ping the phone, but it’s dead. I’m pulling the full call history now. I’ll send you everything as soon as I have it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  There’s a pause. I’m not sure who started it.

  ‘There’s no problem, is there, Fiona? Everything OK your end?’

  I look at de Boissieu.

  He stinks of piss and there’s a bit of chafing at his wrists, but he’s fine. You can’t even see the slap much, though it may yet bruise, I suppose.

  I say, ‘No problems. Making good progress.’

  Ring off.

  I go on interrogating de Boissieu. Don’t get much more, but do get something.

  Money.

  I ask if he had the impression that Mordred was wealthy.

  ‘Oh yes. Certainly. Always a nice watch, nice wine. And when he pay for a meal, it is platinum card.’

  I try to understand what level of wealthy might be involved. Twenty pound bottles of wine? Or hundred pound bottles? Answer, certainly more like twenty, but it’s hard to be sure how much to read into that.

  One other detail too. When de Boissieu first met Mordred, the guy had short hair – ‘this military style, you know, like some American soldier.’ He was extremely tanned, and fit-looking, but a couple of bad burn marks on his hand and forearm.