‘Thank you,’ she says to my neck. ‘Thank you.’
I don’t answer. Just embrace her and Kay and Dad, and watch as Devine is led through the chamber’s little doorway. The officers guiding him ‘miscalculate’ how low he has to stoop to get through and just ram his forehead into the heavy wooden lintel.
They say sorry. Then do it again, harder.
One of the SO15 guys lingers behind. He’d quite like to be playing the hurt-Alex-Devine game too, but duty pulls him back.
He’s waiting to speak to me, but not wanting to interrupt.
Still with Katie’s head in my back, and still in a warm and loving tangle with Dad and Kay, I say, ‘Did you get it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The phone call?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that number he called? You were able to triangulate?’
‘Yes.’
I push the final question at the officer with my eyes only.
He grins. ‘It’s one of those good news, bad news things,’ he says. ‘The call went through to a residential district. You know, these things are never that precise, so we were probably looking at thirty or forty homes in total. Houses where that call could have been received.’
That’s not good. Thirty or forty homes. You can’t kick down the doors to thirty or forty houses, just because you think that one of them shelters a seriously nasty villain.
But my man isn’t done. He has more to tell me.
‘Thing is, though, we’ve got previous with one of those homes.’
‘Previous,’ I say.
Not a question. Not a request for clarification. A prayer, more like. A supplication.
‘Yes. Good previous too. Very good.’
He tells me that one of the residents in the relevant area was the target of a recent major police investigation. No prosecution was ever brought, but the man was found to have had eight boxed mobile phones. Cheapies. Pay-as-you-go things. Unregistered.
A criminal’s toolkit.
‘Eight phones?’ I say. ‘Literally that? Eight?’
He nods.
‘And the triangulation? The area you located?’
He says, ‘Was in an area you probably know better than me.’
I say – breathe, whisper, pray – ‘Penarth. Outside Cardiff. Marine Parade.’
He nods.
I start to ask, ‘And are you—?’
But he interrupts. Doesn’t need the question.
‘And what are we doing about it? Now you’re safe, you mean?’ He shrugs. Sometimes policing is as simple as pie. ‘We’re going in right now, this minute. Your man Idris Prothero? He’s already fucking fucked.’
I like that answer so much, I’d like to kiss the entire world.
54
Home, or near enough.
Cwm George, outside Dinas Powys.
Same hill. Same fort. Same dim beeches and the cantering of invisible knights.
I’m lying back in long grass.
Blue sky above.
Real blue. Clear blue. Summer blue.
An unWelsh version of summer, admittedly, because today is cloudless, and warm, and will probably last for ever.
Somewhere beyond my view, Katie is showing Dad the hill fort.
The ditches. The ramparts.
The fires, the middens, the vanished halls.
Dad will come back vastly overexcited. He’ll start telling everyone about it, in a narrative that will bear only scant resemblance to what Katie is now telling him.
He’ll start buying things too. A handful of Roman coins. Some Celtic pottery. Something for Mam, a necklace probably. A modern reproduction thing that she’ll wear once with a faint and unconvincing smile, then silently discard. The whole enthusiasm will last maybe a week or, if nothing else comes along, two at the outside. Then he’ll be off again, chasing some other hare, racing off down some other track.
The one thing he won’t acquire will be any kind of weapon.
Partly, that’s because Dad has none of that icky male thrill around weaponry. But mostly it’s because he’s already acquired a sword.
Mine. My Caledfwlch.
He didn’t ask for it and I definitely didn’t give it to him. Just, since that night in Brocéliande, the sword has never been in my possession, has always remained in his.
He’s commissioning a presentation mount. Got it sharpened. Brought in someone with a grinder who brought a wholly new, modern sharpness to the blade. (‘Don’t get me wrong, love, you did a fabulous job and all, but if you’re going to have a sword, you’ve got to give it a proper edge.’) As a fake antiquity the thing is ruined, but as an actual weapon – well, it’s never been better.
I don’t care, or don’t think I do.
Things move on. People die. Cases get solved. Swords leave one owner and find a new one.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus. Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.
Even in death, Arthur didn’t plan on staying still. There’s no reason why his sword should be so different.
On the stony path that leads up to the fort I hear the tramp of footsteps.
Heavy. Male. Jackson’s.
He makes the ascent, finds me, plonks himself down.
‘Fiona. Morning.’
I give him my best good morning smile, which is so good it needs no words.
I’ve part-made a daisy chain and start to pick more daisies. Jackson gets out a Tupperware container. Presents some chocolate brownies.
‘My wife made them,’ he announces, with a curious sweet pride.
I nibble a brownie, build my daisy chain and tell Jackson about the hill fort. He’s sort of interested, but only sort of.
After a bit, he says, ‘Fiona, help me out. I understand most of this thing. Some bad guys want to build a fake sword that they think they can sell – almost did sell – for some crazy amount of money. Fine. And to do that, they need some proper academic expertise. They needed people like Gheerbrant to help with the construction. Getting all the details right, that kind of thing. Same thing with de Boissieu. They needed him to help create their – what d’you call it—?’
‘Palimpsest. It comes from the Greek, and basically means rubbed smooth, again. Rubbing was how you prepared your animal skin.’
‘Thank you. I needed to know that.’
I agree happily. ‘Everyone does.’
‘So Gheerbrant does his stuff. De Boissieu does his. Both of those two were bad guys. Not lead bad guys, but part of the conspiracy. I get all that.’
‘But what about Charteris?’ I say. ‘What about John Oakeshott?’
‘Yes. What about them? How did they get mixed up in this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘OK, but if you had to guess . . .?’
I continue work on my daisy chain. Open a hole in the final stem with my fingernail, then pull a fresh stalk through the gap until the flowerhead is pulled snug.
‘I’m running out of daisies.’
‘You’re not going to say?’
‘I am going to say, but I can tell you and make daisy chains. The good daisies are all there by your foot.’
Nodding gravely, Jackson picks some flowers. He does a good job of it too, pinching them off close to the root, to yield the maximum length of green.
I say again, ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘But?’
‘Look, I don’t think Charteris was up to anything so awful, but she was an Arthur nut. An academic historian, yes, but with a personal passion that went far beyond anything narrowly professional. And – we’ve seen her emails – she was worried about the future of her subject. She cared about declines in funding, a loss of interest. It was almost, to her, like twenty-first-century Britain had lost its connection to its one-time saviour. She thought that. I suspect Oakeshott thought so too, or something like it anyway.’
Jackson has now gathered a couple of dozen daisies, maybe more. I need to discard two or three, because the stems are t
oo short or too weedy, but it’s a good pile.
He says, ‘So Charteris and Oakeshott, maybe some others like them, decide to get a little bit naughty. Build some fake antiquity and release it as a PR stunt, something like that.’
‘Yes. Maybe they wanted to show how easily this could be done. Unveiling some potentially Arthurian artefact, before revealing the truth. Or use some kind of “is it real or is it fake” stunt to grab some TV airtime and get attention to their subject. Or something else. My guess is that they hadn’t even decided. And I seriously doubt that they were ever intending to do anything as bold as build a fake Excalibur. I’d have thought a modest little seal box or something was more what they had in mind.
‘Anyway, as the whole idea got more real, Charteris got cold feet. She felt relieved when – as she imagined – the idea was binned. And of course, the idea of faking some minor little piece for basically publicity-type reasons doesn’t sound particularly awful to us. We’re Major Crime types and what they were talking about probably wouldn’t even have qualified as fraud. But they were academics. They risked losing their jobs, their reputations, their own little everythings. So all these not-very-scary academic types played at spies. All their secret emails and phones that no one else could use. They weren’t hiding from us, they were hiding from their fellow-academics.’
Jackson says, ‘And then somewhere along the way, this little group stumbles across the path of some genuine badass criminals. Those criminal types realise that faking antiquities is a massive global market and all this Arthurian stuff gives them a massive opportunity to get in on it.’
‘Right. The art and science of forgery is now way ahead of the art and science of detection. Fakery is already a multi-billion-pound industry – mostly in China and the Middle East – but the same techniques would work just as well here.’
‘And they killed Charteris because . . .?’
‘I don’t know. Because they thought she’d spill the beans, I guess. Her ethics wouldn’t allow her to stay silent as Devine and gang pulled a fake Excalibur from the ground at Liddington. Plus she was working right here, at Dinas Powys. A perfect fort. Perfectly located. Lots of evidence of metalwork. The perfect setting for a fifth-century Arthur.
‘So they planted that seal-box, using an image that they’d use again on the sword. Then killed her spectacularly enough that they could be sure of attracting attention. Their stage-management was intended to reference the Kirkburn Sword, the one the British Museum describes as the finest Iron Age sword in Europe. By killing Charteris like that, they were disposing of a potential blabbermouth and trying to broadcast the idea that some new, amazing sword might be at the heart of this.
‘Same thing with the stone from Llanymawddwy. They wanted us to make the connection to Bangor, to Saint Tydecho, to Camlan. I suspect they were surprised we got there as fast as we did, but I’m sure they were ready to give us another nudge if need be. I took care to let them know that yes, thank you, we’d got the message. Their nudges tended to involve shotguns and/or corpses.’
Jackson says, ‘And Oakeshott?’
‘Oakeshott’s easy. We went in there – I went in there – all hot and heavy. Threatening exposure to the police. Pressurising him. He was scared that he was going to get tagged into a police investigation. That investigation might well reveal that he had dabbled with the idea of deliberately faking an antiquity. That wouldn’t bother us, but as he saw it, he stood to lose his job, his reputation, everything.’
‘Right, OK. So Oakeshott doesn’t just come clean with you. Instead, he gets on the phone to all his mates, trying to figure out a strategy. Trouble is, one of his mates was in league with the bad guys and passes the news on. The bad guys don’t think they can take the risk of letting Oakeshott talk to the police, so they find a bit of local talent, this Wormold guy, and arrange the killing. All a bit messy and last minute, but anything to get the job done.’
‘Yes, exactly. If we work hard enough, I expect we’ll find a link between Devine and Wormold. At any rate, I’m pretty sure that Devine gave the order.’
Jackson thinks about that. Gathers more daisies.
We’re motoring now. Him gathering, me stitching them.
He says, ‘So we’ve got two groups. The first group is a bunch of mildly obsessive academic types. They were basically harmless and their little conspiracy was in the process of disintegrating anyway. The second group – Devine, Ivor Williams, those people – were genuinely dangerous and ambitious men. But somewhere along the way something or someone connected the two.’
I nod. ‘I think the connection ran from Gheerbrant to Devine. Devine was a skilled amateur blacksmith with an interest in the period and plenty of experience in combat and weapons generally. Gheerbrant was the leading researcher in Europe when it came to Dark Age warfare. It’s more than likely the two men knew each other innocently in the first instance. Then got talking. And that’s when things started to turn serious.’
Jackson agrees.
In this blue and bee-buzzed air, it’s hard to get too exercised by what are now no more than details.
Jackson tries opening up a daisy stalk with his thumbnail, but his nails are too short to be of use.
I say, ‘I’ll do the stalks, if you do the threading.’
‘OK.’
I watch him set to. He’s not very good, if I’m honest, but I’m not honest. I tell him he’s doing a wonderful job.
‘Are we doing this for a reason, Fiona?’
‘I always have a reason, sir.’
‘And on this occasion, the reason would be . . .?’
‘To build a super-massive daisy chain. Obviously.’
He shrugs.
We thread daisies.
On a rampart to our left, Katie and Dad are looking out at the view.
She uses a crutch always now. Her legs are OK, but that right foot drags almost permanently.
Jackson studies the two figures. We’re not here on a jolly. Jackson needs to talk to Dad and I chose this spot to arrange the meeting, because Dad is always more communicative when he’s relaxed and a bit excited. If we met up in Jackson’s office, Dad would freeze completely. We’d get nothing.
Jackson drops his eyes from that blue-green horizon and says, ‘You took a hell of a risk that night.’
Did I? I still don’t think I had any alternatives. Unless I’d coaxed Devine into taking me to Brocéliande, I think we’d never have found the place. I think Katie and Kay would have died there.
But yes, I took a risk.
I never thought Devine would actually hand over five million bucks, but I did think that he’d let me and the hostages go in exchange for my Caledfwlch and my silence. Turns out I was half-right, half-wrong. Right about the money, wrong about the whole letting us go free thing.
‘Good old Tidy, then,’ says Jackson.
Yes. Good old Tidy. Good old Bowen.
My dad and Bowen didn’t just watch me go and leave it at that. They worked their way down the edge of a neighbouring property until they could see into Devine’s farmyard.
They saw him striding about his yard. Saw me moving about in his living room. Saw us climb into his four-by-four, my belt-end trailing on the ground.
‘That’s not right,’ my dad said. ‘She wants help.’
Bowen too. ‘Tidy knows her,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what he can do.’
Tidy.
Not a sniffer dog, but something at least as good or, truth be told, a good bit better. He was – is – a Welsh sheepdog, the single most intelligent, most capable dog breed on the planet.
Bowen let Tidy out of Dad’s car. Gave him some bits and pieces with my scent on. Took him to the scent of that fallen belt.
Dogs can’t shrug, but if they could, I think Tidy would have shrugged, muttered, ‘Jeez, humans, honestly.’ Then gone off to do his stuff.
A dog handler once told me that sniffer dogs aren’t recruited for their powers of smell. ‘They can all smell well enough. Asking th
em to follow a trail is like asking you to pick a red ball from a basket full of green ones. The only issue is whether the dog understands what you’re asking and feels like helping.’
Well, Tidy understood and Tidy was happy to help.
He trotted diligently through the night, nose to the ground, nose to the trail I’d left for him. According to Bowen, he only ever paused to check that his doltish human companions were approximately keeping up. ‘He never even came close to losing the scent.’
Tidy led the two men straight to Devine’s four-by-four. The men checked inside, in case I was there, dead, bound or bleeding. They didn’t find me, but did find Caledfwlch.
Dad took it. Let Tidy pursue the, now much stronger, trail into the wood itself.
Tidy bounded through the undergrowth. Found the drain cover. The hole that led down to Brocéliande.
And as for the rest? Well, I was there for the rest.
I did ask, later, why Dad chose to enter with the sword, not the gun. It wasn’t, I gently suggested, the most obvious of tactics.
‘Oh love, I had the gun too. I mean, it was there if I needed it. But the sword just felt better, really. There was no way I was going to mess things up with you and Kay down there.’
That makes no sense. No sense at all. But the way he tells it, the choice was natural.
‘Tell you what, though. That man of yours, Bowen, he’s quite something, isn’t he?’
I agreed, and agreed heartily, but asked Dad what he meant.
‘Before I went down there, down that little hole, Bowen made me stop. He put the sign of the cross on both my shoulders. I mean, that’s not normal, is it? It should be on the chest or something.’
I do a little double-take at that. Remember my Nennius.
The eighth battle was at the fortress of Guinnion, in which Arthur carried the image of holy Mary ever virgin on his shoulders; and the pagans were put to flight on that day. And through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the power of the blessed Virgin Mary his mother there was great slaughter among them.
*
I said, ‘George is a vicar, Dad. Of course he likes the sign of the cross.’
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 37
