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

by Harry Bingham

  Instead of a few simple bullets, he’ll have to batter me to death. Kay and Katie too. That’s harder than shooting, and messy.

  And, just for now, we have a pause.

  Devine is about four or five yards from me. About the same distance from Kay and Katie. We sit in a kind of loose triangle in this place of rock and earth and dampness.

  To Kay, I say, ‘You OK, sweetie?’

  She says yes.

  I ask the same of Katie.

  She succeeds in implying, with relatively few words, that she has seen better days, admittedly, but overall she’s bearing up reasonably well, given the circs.

  I jerk my thumb at Devine.

  ‘This is Alex Devine. If he gets close to you at all, grab for anything soft. Eyes. Windpipe. Balls. Mouth. Just hold on as hard as you can and do as much damage as you can. An arm over his windpipe would be a particularly excellent outcome.’

  Neither Kay nor Katie are going to be the world’s greatest ever fighters, but in a three-way contest between Devine and the three of us, I’d probably lay my money on us. Two to impede his movement, one to choke him, bite him, gouge him, hurt him.

  They tell me OK. Look fierce.

  The shelf of stores is over to my left. I give it my attention for the first time, hoping to find a weapon. A gun, a knife, anything.

  Nothing.

  Tinned food, lots of it. Spare batteries. Two large plastic jerrycans of water. A bundle of clothes. Some cooking equipment, but nothing that looks useful.

  Also – of course – peeping from a roll of blanket – Excalibur. Devine’s version.

  ‘May I?’

  He doesn’t say anything. Goes on scowling at me. Dabbing at his bloodied arm.

  I realise that he’d actually like me to occupy my hands with the sword. The thing makes me less dangerous, not more.

  In here, a sword is a clumsy old weapon. The roof is mostly too low, the walls too close, to permit much slashing action, and I’m just not strong enough to use it effectively as a thrusting blade.

  To top it all, the floor is far too uneven for that kind of fighting. When this place was quarried, I presume they just lifted stone from wherever it was easiest to extract it. What they left was a cavity, like a downward pointing funnel, only much more ragged.

  The lowest point of the chamber – one with probably permanent standing water – is perhaps twelve or fifteen feet below the crudely-made roof. Around that low point, the floor rises in a series of uneven, rising ledges. There’s almost nowhere you can walk, one foot in front of another, without stepping down, or stepping up, or in some other way having to watch your footwork.

  Kay and Katie are chained up on the back wall of the chamber. Devine occupies a place just right of the door. I’m with the stores, crouched up under the left-hand wall.

  I look at the sword.

  All this, everything we’ve done, centring on this one damn object.

  The sword blade looks much like my own. They’ve done a slightly better job of ageing it, maybe, but they had longer to do it.

  The hilt and decoration is less nice than ours. A tad clumsier. Less refined.

  I lift it.

  It’s a nice sword, but cold. It has no life. I don’t like it.

  I say, ‘This isn’t Caledfwlch.’

  Devine says, ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not Caledfwlch. It’s not Excalibur.’

  ‘Of course it’s not fucking Excalibur—’

  ‘No, but . . . it’s not . . . don’t you see?’

  I don’t quite know how to say the thing I’m trying to express. Just – this fakery. This business of forging something for sale. Yes, there’s the whole technical correctness aspect. Getting the blade right, the hilt right, the decoration, all that. But this sword, of all things, is meant to embody something more. Fifteen centuries of British liberty. British valour.

  In the doorway, a shadow moves, black on black.

  Devine is finished repairing his arm. He’s searching around now in the litter of loose rock next to him for a good-sized stone.

  The one he chooses is about the size of his two balled fists together. A smooth lump of rock that could knock me unconscious if he gets the blow half-right. That could empty my brains in a splatter of grey, if he times things exactly so.

  I clamber down into the low point of the chamber. Up to my ankles in water. My stupid bluebell-coloured skirt and stupid-stupid strappy sandals are really not made for this kind of treatment. The water is cold and that fine mud of pond bottoms – so fine, it’s almost silky – begins to ooze between my toes.

  I wield the sword.

  Face Devine.

  I say, ‘Rex quondam, rexque futurus. The once and future king. This was meant to be his sword. It was never just about making something that looked old.’

  Devine stands. Stone in his right hand. A let’s-finish-this-thing look on his face.

  He’s taller than me. He’s higher than me. He’s stronger than me. He’s more effectively armed than me.

  But he is standing right where I want him, with his back to the door.

  And just as he’s poised to attack, an attack which will kill me, the doorway is no longer empty.

  My father is there. Eyes flaming. Face angrier than I’ve ever seen it.

  And Caledfwlch. The proper sword, my sword, rescued from the back of Devine’s car.

  Dad says, ‘You stupid English fucker,’ adding in Welsh, ‘Twll dîn pob Sais.’

  Every Englishman an arsehole.

  Devine whirls.

  Dad thrusts.

  He gashes Devine in the belly. A two-handed blow that has all of Dad’s, now considerable, weight behind it.

  When we made Caledfwlch, we made it the way Gheerbrant suggested. The hardness of steel over a springy iron core. We got a very sharp edge on it. A very sharp point.

  But then we had to age the thing. Make it look like it had been dinged about in combat. Like it had spent fifteen long centuries buried under the earth at Liddington.

  By the time we did all that, the edge was gone. The point blunted, dull.

  All the same, my Dad is two or three inches over six foot. He must now weigh well over two hundred pounds. And if he’s hardly a servant of the Body Beautiful, he’s still a strong and powerful man who does not shrink from violence. Whose two daughters have been carried at gunpoint to this place.

  Whose daughters were brought here to die.

  Devine’s belly rips open.

  A jagged, long, uneven tear. Blood red and peeping with the first spillage of guts, grey-white and slippery with fluid.

  The blow, the sheer force of it, knocks Devine off-balance.

  He lurches backwards and, on this uneven surface, an unguarded lurch turns quickly into a sprawling fall.

  He ends up, head lower than his feet, by me in the little pool. He’s torn about, but perfectly alive.

  I clamber back. Away from his arms. Away from that rock. Go to Kay and Katie. Put my arms around them. And we shelter there, cramped up against these damp walls, the three frightened naiads of this place.

  The fight is not yet done.

  Devine, professional soldier that he was, professional mercenary that he still is, assesses his belly wound with a calculating eye.

  Is it bad? Yes. Is it disabling? No.

  Devine, checking his balance, stands again. Reaches for his sword, the one that has just sold for seventy-eight million dollars.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he says. ‘And fuck your family.’

  For a moment, just a moment, there is silence and standoff.

  Two adult men, holding swords.

  Dad is on higher ground. Devine stands where I was, feet in water and that silken mud. The swords are big – two-handed affairs – but Devine, I notice, is still a bit distracted by that slash to his belly. He doesn’t remove his hand from the sword exactly but, still gripping the hilt, he uses the heel of his hand to explore the tear.

  Dad is utterly still. Entirely watchful. And s
omehow massive. Castled against the light.

  Then Devine strikes upwards.

  He’s realised he’s too low to strike effectively at Dad’s head or chest, so instead he seeks a slashing blow to Dad’s thigh. A disabling blow to even the odds. Indeed, if this battle lasts for any length of time, then the younger, stronger, fitter man will likely win it.

  But Dad is equal to the attack. Fends it with his sword pointing down into the rock, immobile and grave as a statued king.

  Three times, Devine attacks. Each time the same result.

  Dad parries, deftly but with an immensity of stillness. As calm as though protected by a stone wall.

  After those three assaults, Dad murmurs, ‘Is that all you’ve got, Saxon?’

  Twitches his blade one way, but not fast enough to secure a hit.

  Too slow, I think, Dad, that’s too slow.

  Devine thinks so too. Moves his sword for the parry. Is already, I think, considering his instant counter.

  But Dad was feinting, not striking. With Devine’s sword tempted out to his left, Dad’s Caledfwlch flashes up in a sweeping curve to Devine’s right armpit. Devine sees the move and tries to counter, but there’s something wrong, he’s too slow. He misses the parry, by an inch or two only, perhaps, but a miss is as good as a mile.

  There’s an audible impact. A spurt of blood. And, as Devine is still trying to understand the damage – trying to refigure his odds, his strategy – Caledfwlch returns. An arcing descent. Dad’s weight, two-handed, piled behind the blow.

  Caledfwlch bites deep into Devine’s arm. Is stopped only by a shudder of bone. A whole tearing flap of muscle flops loose, like something seen in the backroom of a butcher’s shop.

  Devine drops his sword.

  Drops it from shock. From the physical impact.

  But also and anyway – the thing is useless now. A sword like that carried one-handed is an encumbrance not an asset, and Devine has only one working arm now.

  There’s shock on his face, certainly. A taut, shining emptiness. But also fear.

  Recognition that this is where it ends. Everything.

  His job. His criminal activity. His passions. His freedom.

  Perhaps his life.

  Dad, implacable, places his sword tip on Devine’s chest and pushes hard.

  Our Caledfwlch didn’t have much of a point left after all the work we’d done to age it. Its tip, so sharp and bright when it first left the blacksmith’s fire, became dulled. Softly rounded even.

  But Devine was already tottering when the shove came and that cave bottom remains treacherous. In any event, Dad pushes. Devine falls. He strikes his head hard enough on the stone floor, that there’s an audible lift to his head as it bounces.

  There’s more blood, but not much and, anyway, in this dim light it’s hard to tell.

  Devine is useless now.

  Disarmed. Disabled. Defunct.

  On my right, Kay, realising for the first time that she is completely safe, that no more bad things can happen, starts to cry. Sobs, bundled into my shoulder.

  She won’t watch what happens next, but Dad, I know, is not about to leave this man alone. I remember that line about Gwawrddur feeding black ravens on the rampart of a fortress. Dad shifts his grip on Caledfwlch. Checks the rocky slope in front of him. And steps forward.

  Here, in the dimness of Brocéliande, we are watching a man being turned into raven meat. I don’t want to watch, but can’t help myself. Katie too. I feel her beside me, watching with a shared intensity.

  And because we’re watching the last sickening round of this battle to the death, no one sees that George Bowen has arrived here too. Gunned up, but also wearing his dog collar, that curve of Christian white.

  ‘Tom,’ he shouts.

  My dad’s attention barely flickers. He has a man to turn into raven meat. That first, everything else second.

  Devine is trying to crawl away. But the slope is against him and there’s nowhere to go.

  Dad considers his next blow. It will be a final one, I’m certain. Head or chest? Or neck?

  I think it’s going to be the head.

  Bowen again: ‘Tom Griffiths, you bugger.’

  At that, Dad does pause.

  A pause only, mind you. He still doesn’t turn to Bowen. Still doesn’t shift his eyes from his prey. This about-to-be carcass.

  Into that pause, Bowen says, ‘You will drop that sword or I will shoot you in the arm. And I swear to do it, so help me God.’

  He would too.

  He has the gun raised and levelled. And if you’re a farmer capable of shooting a fox galloping across your sheep field, you’ve got the calmness and accuracy to do what’s needed here.

  I say, ‘Dad, drop the sword. We’re all safe. Please drop the sword.’

  Kay too. ‘Dad. Dad.’

  And – slowly – Dad returns from whatever dark place he was to this world of ours, his happy, living daughters.

  He shakes his head.

  In front of him, Devine’s leg lies at an angle over a shelf of stone. Dad uses his foot to shift the leg. He’s gentle enough about it. Almost looks as though he’s making the man more comfortable. When he doesn’t get exactly the effect he wants first time, he nudges again until everything is exactly so.

  He lays the sword down.

  Looks at Bowen with a kind of ‘satisfied now?’ move of his eyebrows.

  Then stamps hard, brutally hard, on Devine’s exposed knee joint. The injured man gasps in pain. He hasn’t gasped this way before. When Dad moves his foot, Devine’s leg lies at the wrong angle. Blood darkening at the bend.

  Bowen’s face is fierce and he hasn’t shifted his gun.

  But Dad moves. Up and away from Devine, his mood rising and lightening as he does so. Bowen softens his hold on the gun, pointing it loosely at Devine in a ‘no false moves’ sort of way.

  Dad, approaching us, says, ‘Kay. Kay, love, are you all right? And Katie, is it? Lovely to meet you. That silly bugger won’t cause any more problems.’

  Dad’s huge paws embrace the three of us in a giant squeeze, Katie hugged in as chest-crushingly close as all the rest of us. Kay’s crying, but she’s OK. These are tears of relief, not hurt. She’s OK. We’re all OK.

  And by the time I manage to pull away, in search of those little things – air, light, the ability to breathe – I find Katie, staring intently at Devine’s fallen sword.

  ‘Look,’ she says.

  I look.

  Devine is lying back. Holding his tattered arm, shadowed and watched by Bowen’s implacable gun.

  On the floor of the cave, Devine’s sword. Seventy-eight million dollars’ worth of fakery.

  And first I don’t see it, but then I do. The blade bent too far. It’s twenty degrees off true, maybe more.

  That’s why Devine was too slow to counter Dad’s thrust to the armpit. That’s why his parry missed Caledfwlch by that crucial inch.

  Katie says, ‘They overworked their metal. That sword has too much steel. They needed some spring in the centre of the blade, that soft iron core, and they just beat it out.’

  That makes me laugh.

  I call over to Devine. ‘Alex, mate, did you hear that? Your sword is shit. All that – all that – and you couldn’t even make a good sword.’

  Devine doesn’t answer. But the dull lamps in his eyes swerve to his sword. Then to Caledfwlch. His lips move, but say nothing.

  I say, ‘George, it’s nice seeing you and everything, but do you think someone should call the police?’

  He tells me that SO15 are on their way. That’s why Bowen entered the cave after Dad. He was on the phone above ground, giving directions and making arrangements.

  Fifteen minutes pass.

  Bowen, peaceably, pointing his gun in Devine’s general direction. But Devine’s eyes are closed now. He’s not dead or anything like it, but he’s sunk into contemplation of his own injury. His general fuckedness.

  Dad uses the bad sword, not Caledfwlch,
to smash Kay and Katie out of their chains.

  ‘That’s better now,’ he says. Then, ‘Oops, look at that. Clumsy.’

  Says that, as he leans his weight on Devine’s blade and actually bends it back on itself, the weapon as vanquished as its owner.

  And then—

  Finally, SO15. Four men in black Kevlar. Sub-machine guns. The whole deal.

  A bit over-gunned for this particular situation and all a bit better-late-than-never, but what the hell. We greet them anyway.

  The men drag Devine ungently from his fallen position. Frisk him.

  One of the men pokes at Devine’s gaping arm wound.

  ‘Ouch, that must hurt, right?’

  And pokes again.

  Another man plays with Devine’s injured leg. Moving it this way and that. Saying, ‘Nasty. Oh, that looks really bad.’

  Moves it more.

  Devine’s injuries are nasty but, unless there’s a lot more damage than we can see, nothing there strikes me as lethal. The SO15 guys have some type of compression bandages with them and they strap Devine up. One bandage over the arm. The other one over his torn belly, so he won’t just spill his guts as they drag him away. Devine’s other injuries aren’t bad enough to need treatment, or not down here, not in this rocky little operating theatre.

  When they’re done bandaging him, they start to move him, and every single movement they make is designed to hurt. When they shift him around, they grab his torn arm and just jerk. When they carry him towards the door, they keep ‘accidentally’ slamming shins and belly against the hard gritstone edges.

  I’m not mostly a fan of police violence, but I don’t count this. I watch them deliberately hurt the man. Watch the set of his face as he takes the blows.

  He’s combat-experienced. He knows what happens to the losers. He knows too that this is still the good part. That some breath of open air, of freedom, of young leaves and rain-freshened earth can still reach him here.

  In a few minutes time, the guy will be in a police van. Then custody. Then prison.

  For ever.

  No remission.

  No exit.

  A well-deserved end.

  Katie watches him go. She leans into my neck. Her hair – the braided hair of that Anglo–Saxon warrior princess – still smells of the shampoo she used last night, lemony and herbal. And beneath that smell, better than it, her smell. Warm and intimate.