Praise for the Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller series
‘Gritty, compelling . . . a [police] procedural unlike any other you are likely to read this year’ USA Today
‘With Detective Constable Fiona ‘Fi’ Griffiths, Harry Bingham . . . finds a sweet spot in crime fiction . . . think Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander . . . Denise Mina’s ‘Paddy’ Mehan [or] Lee Child’s Jack Reacher . . . The writing is terrific’ Boston Globe
‘DC Fiona Griffiths is ditsy, funny, stubborn and sharp . . . Bingham provides a spirited Welsh response to the Scottish domination of British crime fiction’ The Times
‘A dark delight, and I look forward to Fiona’s future struggles with criminals, her demons and the mysteries of her past’ Washington Post
‘Bingham has gotten inside the mind of his clever, neurotic heroine so well as to make her seem entirely credible . . . An interesting, unusual and in some ways even moving crime novel’ Literary Review
‘A most intriguing, if peculiar, detective . . . Bingham doesn’t stint on plot (very complicated), procedures (very detailed) or action (very brutal)’ New York Times
‘Compelling . . . a new crime talent to treasure’ Daily Mail
‘Bingham’s novels always contain something unexpected. This fast-moving novel contains some of the most ingenious murder methods in modern crime fiction’ Sunday Times
‘A stunner with precision plotting, an unusual setting, and a deeply complex protagonist . . . We have the welcome promise of more books to come’ The Seattle Times
‘Exceptional . . . Absorbing . . . Fiona’s narrative sears the pages’ Kirkus Reviews
THE DEEPEST GRAVE
FIONA GRIFFITHS BOOK 6
HARRY BINGHAM
Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Author’s Note
Make sure you’ve read the other books in the series
Stay in touch
Dedication
Copyright
1
Cardiff, March 2016.
Jon Breakell has just completed his chef d’oeuvre, his masterpiece. The Mona Lisa of office art.
The masterpiece in question is a dinosaur made of bulldog clips, twisted biro innards and a line of erasers that Jon has carved into spikes.
‘There,’ he says.
Stands back. Inspects.
‘Do you think it needs claws?’ he asks. ‘Paperclips maybe?’
He starts to break paperclips into spikes. Tries to figure out the claw conundrum.
Foolish boy. Complacent child.
As Jon – head down, attention buried – works with his paperclips, I get out the Great Crossbow of Doom, as Jon himself christened it. The Great Crossbow involves no fewer than six rubber bands, the really thick, strong sort, and it uses, for its shaft and crosspiece, an entire boxful of pencils taped together. The thing is a bit bendier than it ought to be, but it can still fire the little metal edge-piece stolen from the office whiteboard more than thirty feet across the room, and Jon’s desk stands a lot closer than that.
He fixes his paperclip spikes into a bulldog clip and gently attaches them to his only slightly tottering dinosaur. There’s a moment of serious wobble where it looks like the whole thing might collapse, but Jon adjusts a grip somewhere and the edifice stabilises.
‘There!’ he says, genuinely proud.
And, fair dos, that pride is justified. This hasn’t been the first dinosaur he’s constructed, but it’s easily the biggest and certainly the best. It’s taken him all morning to get this far.
But I am a hunter and my heart has no mercy.
I load the Great Crossbow of Doom and pull it back till the pencils groan against the walls of their sticky tape prison. Jon half-turns to me, wanting, I think, to harvest the praise that is his due.
Turns enough that he sees what happens next.
The Crossbow straining to its uttermost. A quick release. The whiteboard edge-piece flying through the air and striking Jon’s tyrannosaur in its unprotected belly. An explosion of metal stationery and spiked erasers. The edge-piece falling to the floor, its deadly mission complete.
‘Fi!’ says Jon. ‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘It’s the Great Crossbow of Doom,’ I explain. ‘It’s doomy.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Jon says again, down on his knees now, finding bits of lost tyrannosaur under his desk.
And that’s how we are – me, Jon, the bones of the fallen – when Dennis Jackson comes in.
Dennis Jackson, my boss. The detective chief inspector who presides over our happy breed, this little world. A world that is, theoretically, devoted to the investigation and prosecution of major crime, except that the good citizens of Cardiff are too tame, too meek, too unimaginatively law-abiding to generate much crime worthy of the ‘major’ dignity.
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’
I twang my crossbow. ‘Maintaining order, sir. My duty and my pleasure.’
Jackson bites his thumb. He has the look of a man meditating some tedious comment about how the construction and demolition of dinosaurs is not what Jon and I are paid to do.
He doesn’t say that, though even thinking it is tedious.
Instead, he fingers the wodge of paper on my desk. On the topmost sheet, there’s a figure scrawled in blue biro, big fat digits thickened out by a lot of cross-hatching and multiple outlines. The figure is ‘453’. On the sheet beneath, there’s a similar figure, but in black biro, that says, ‘452’. And so on, all the way back to one that reads ‘19 December 2014, Rhydwyn Lloyd, RIP.’ Four hundred and fifty-three days since my last proper corpse.
Jackson says, ‘You’re still doing this? You had an attempted murder in Llanrumney just four weeks ago. Gary Whateverhisnameis.’
I shake my head at that. How does anyone think that ‘attempted murder’ counts the same as actual murder? They shouldn’t even call it ‘attempted’: that’s just a way to flatter failure. The crime is as close as you can get to the opposite of murder. And not just that, but bloody Gary Whateverhisnameis was stupid enough and drunk e
nough to pull a knife on someone in a pub where there were about twenty-five witnesses, and the entire investigation comprised little more than sitting Gary the Moron down in an interview room, telling him to make a full statement and then listening to his tedious, self-justifying repetitions as he confessed to the whole damn thing. I mean, I’m happy to accept that destroying bulldog clip dinosaurs is not strictly speaking within my job description, but then again my job description does actually involve major crime and as far as I’m concerned, DCI Dennis Jackson, fine man that he is, has signally failed to deliver his end of the bargain.
I don’t say that and, in any case, Jackson has already moved on.
He takes a bit of paper from the stack by the printer and fiddles around in my pen-holder mug, one that I was given by the office secret Santa in December. On one side the mug says ‘grammar police’ and on the other, ‘warning. I am silently correcting your grammar.’ When I was given the mug, it came with black insulating tape over the word ‘silently’.
Jackson finds a biro and scribbles till the ink flows.
Then he takes my 453 page and throws it away. On a fresh sheet, he writes:
16 March 2016
Gaynor Charteris
RIP
Places that where my 453 one previously lay.
I say, ‘Gaynor Charteris. What, a coroner’s inquest thing?’
That’s not good English – my own internal grammar copper is already stripping down and refitting that sentence – but Jackson knows what I mean. I mean that any unexplained death needs to be examined by a coroner and plenty of those deaths require some form of police involvement, however sketchy. I don’t count those things, however, and Jackson knows it.
Jackson says, ‘Yes, there will need to be a coroner’s inquest, of course.’
‘OK, let me guess. Some granny slipped on the stairs and we need to confirm there were no suspicious circumstances.’
‘Well, I don’t yet know much about the incident, but I understand that, yes, there were some circumstances that do possibly seem suspicious.’
My face moves. An involuntary thing. I don’t know what it says, what it signifies.
I just about manage to speak, though, and what I find myself saying is, ‘Suspicious circumstances, sir? I mean, what? An open window, something missing, that kind of thing?’
‘Well, I don’t know about the windows. That part hasn’t been reported to me. But the uniformed officer currently attending the scene did say that this woman appears to have been beheaded. I daresay there’ll need to be some further forensic work needed before we can be certain, but it appears that the weapon of choice was an antique broadsword. It’s obviously early days, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say that no, Gaynor Charteris probably did not slip on any stairs. And I’d appreciate it, please, if – Jon, Fiona – the pair of you could act like a pair of grown-up, professional detectives and get your arses over to the scene without fucking anything up or making me want to strangle you.’
He hasn’t even finished his speech, before I have my jacket on, bag over my shoulder, keys in my hand.
2
Dinas Powys.
A biggish village just outside Cardiff. A wooded valley. A low hill.
The road we want is a cul-de-sac. Two lines of smiling semis. Concrete ramps and little carports. Ornamental willows and a scatter of catkins. On a low wall, in the sunshine, a ginger tom licks its parts.
Around one house, crime tape.
A pair of coppers. A mutter of radio.
Police vehicles too, of course. Two patrol cars. A scientific support services van, door open, half-blocking the road. Also, a silver Vauxhall Astra carelessly parked, front wheel on the pavement, the car itself at a loose diagonal to the kerb. That artfully poor parking signals the presence of some plain-clothes police presence, possibly the divisional surgeon or more likely whatever DI has been given this case.
‘That’s Jones, that is,’ says Jon. ‘Bleddyn bloody Jones.’
Bleddyn Jones: a DI recently shuffled down from Bridgend. A close friend of the Chief Constable, according to unreliable Cathays rumour. I’ve seen the guy kicking around the office, of course, and we’ve had a few glancing encounters, but I can’t say I really know him. I do note, however, that Jon, who knows him better, does not wear an expression garlanded with joy, merriment and delight.
We park, properly, and walk to the house.
The CSIs want us to put on paper suits, paper overshoes, and masks before we go further. Someone provides us with the necessaries. As usual, no one has bothered to bring a suit that is even remotely in my size, so I go flapping around like someone struggling free of a discarded parachute.
We enter the house.
A beige carpet ascending calmly. Coats sitting comfortably on pegs. Women’s coats only. Some boots beneath, including one pair of muddy walking boots. On the wall, a pre-Raphaelite print. A bored-looking woman at a loom, a big circular window behind.
There’s someone tramping around upstairs, but most of the noise is coming from the living room. Jon sticks his head round the corner. Says, ‘Jon Breakell and Fiona Griffiths. Just arrived.’
A voice tells us to come in, and we do.
The room was probably once quite carefully put together. Comfortable, tidy. A mixture of John Lewis good taste and little flashes of personality: old pottery, a display of Roman coins, prints of some medieval pageant or tournament.
But the way it is now, we don’t spend so much time admiring the tapestry-style chesterfield or the hand-knotted Persian carpet. In part, we’re distracted by the obvious disturbance in the furnishings. A coffee table thrown aside. A fallen lamp stand. But mostly, it’s hard to take in anything much except a woman’s corpse outstretched on the floor, in the spot where the coffee table once stood. I say ‘corpse’, but what lies on the floor is only the body. The woman’s head sits on a little bureau in the corner, drizzling the last of its blood and ooze into a mess of computer wires.
The head boasts short grey hair, splitched and spotted with blood. Hazel eyes, with the lamps gone out. The mouth sharply down-turned. Her natural look, maybe. Or some post-mortem muscular contraction. Or something else. But she looks shocked or grumpy, as though meditating a scathing comment on the state of her carpet.
Beside the body, a sword – an antique broadsword, Jackson called it. And in the body, planted deep in the chest, three spears.
The spearheads themselves look genuinely old. They have the dug-up, cleaned-up, age-pitted look of real museum pieces. Their shafts, on the other hand, are short and obviously modern. New wood. Broom handles, repurposed.
At first glance, it doesn’t look to me as though the spears played any part in the killing. There’s a large volume of blood in the room, of course. Much of it draining from the hacked-off stump, plus a generous backsplatter from the process of hacking. But the spear-wounds themselves haven’t bled all that much, indicating that the body was largely free of blood by the time the spears were planted.
I could happily – would happily – spend hours alone in this room, if given half a chance, but Jones’s little terrier face, with its angry little stub-end of beard, comes vibrating up to us.
He speaks like an office memo, all pre-packed executive summary. You can almost watch the bullet points firing from his mouth. The headings, the sub-headings, the checklists.
‘Deceased is Gaynor Charteris,’ he says. ‘Doctor Charteris, that is. Not a medical doctor, but a part-time lecturer in archaeology for the Open University. Perhaps some local teaching commitments too, we’re trying to track those now. Sole resident at this address. Divorcée, two adult kids, thought to be living abroad. Age of the deceased: fifty-three. No known money problems. No known disputes. No sound of disturbance reported.
‘Rectal temperature is the same as ambient, so that’s saying twelve hours plus since time of death. Rigor mortis still present in the larger muscles, so we’re thinking a maximum of twenty-four, thirty hours, something like that
, but with blood loss on this scale, who knows? Anyway, we’ll get better estimates soon.
‘Cause of death and murder weapon both obvious enough. Murder weapon seems to have been on site—’ he nods behind us at a stretch of wall, where empty fixings seem to imply a sword once hung ‘but we’ll need to verify that assumption. No indication of forced entry, implying the attacker was possibly known to the victim.’
His bullet points run temporarily dry. A hammer clicking on emptiness.
I nod towards the table where the good Doctor Charteris’s head is leaking its last, a table that boasts a mess of wires but no laptop, no phone, no iPad.
Charteris’s faintly tutting aura disapproves of their loss.
‘Theft?’
‘Probably. We’ve not located any cash, cards, phone or computer hardware. But the value of that stuff . . .’
He shrugs rather than completing his sentence, but his meaning is clear. Yes, you might want to nick a few hundred quid’s worth of computer junk from a single middle-aged woman. But no, you probably wouldn’t want to go to the trouble of all this head-loppy-offy, spear-jabby stuff if your only reward was a second-hand laptop and a handful of bankcards.
He reloads and continues, ‘We’re obviously looking at some kind of maniac or some kind of ritual killing. If it’s a maniac, he’s probably local, otherwise why trek out here? So we need to ask around. Neighbours. Vicar. Doctor’s surgery. Local mental health. Fiona, I want you to take the lead on that. You’ve got three uniforms to work with. Stay in touch. I want regular reports.
‘Jon, I want you to look at the possible ritual aspect here. That’s desk work. Take a look at the PNC. Call the National Crime Agency, see if they have any experience of anything like this. Check Interpol for possible overseas angles. OK? Got that? Yes?’
I think he wants us to yessir him and go trotting off like a pair of Spanish show ponies, but off and away I do not trot.
‘Permission to familiarise myself with the scene, sir? I want to get a feel for the man we’re pursuing.’
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 1