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

by Harry Bingham

  ‘So: two “don’t knows” and one “probably wait”?’

  I can see I’m losing this. Can see that, almost no matter what I next say, I’m losing this.

  I say, ‘I think our view of the Charteris murder needs to answer six questions. One, why was she beheaded? Two, why did she have three Iron Age spears plunged into her chest? Three, why were the main archaeological finds stolen? Four, why was the bit of broken cross, the piece that led us to Llanymawddwy, left behind? Five, why was the lock broken at Bangor Cathedral? Six, why were the Llanymawddwy thieves armed with a shotgun?’

  ‘Those are the key questions? In your opinion?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘OK, well I can answer two of them right now. Charteris was beheaded because someone wanted to kill her. The lock was broken up at Bangor because someone wanted to obtain entrance. Oh, and here’s a third. The thieves were in possession of a shotgun, because they were bloody thieving.’

  Jones does his beast of prey, leg-or-liver grin again and rotates it round the table to ensure he gets a harvest of answering smiles. He gets his smiles but, I notice, the smiles are more dutiful than sincere.

  I find myself murmuring, ‘A press release might be helpful, sir. We could put these historical matters out into the public domain.’

  ‘That’s your “actionable next step”? A press release?’

  ‘Yes. See if we get any useful leads from the academic community.’

  ‘And if we do that, you will be content to drop active investigation of this “historical angle”?’

  No.

  No, no, no, no, no, no.

  That’s what I think. What I say is, ‘Unless new evidence comes to light. Yes.’

  He stares at me. There is something cold and dead in the light of his eyes. Something like the touch of a fish belly. The chill of marble.

  I think, Jones actually hates me. And so soon. I’m used to people disliking me, but it normally takes longer than this. And I don’t actually think I’ve done anything to earn this hatred. Haven’t, for once, screwed up my ordinary work, turned up late, sworn at the wrong time, or done any of those other terrible things I too often do. This hatred is just earned by me being me. Or worse: me being a good version of me. The version that Jackson likes, not the one that makes him want to tear my head off.

  Ah well. Since me-being-me is, short of a brain transplant, an issue I’m unlikely to fix, I just let Jones’s opinion go.

  With a hey and a ho, I let it go.

  Off we rumble to other things.

  Jones has replaced his early Local Nutter theory with its close replacement, the Reasonably Local Nutter theory.

  So, instead of looking at nutters within a short drive or bus-route from Dinas Powys, Jones wants to expand the search to all of south Wales. ‘Basically, any individual with a history of mental illness and possible violence. If there’s psychosis there – hearing voices, that kind of thing – then so much the better. That’s our target group. We just need to start mapping movements, interests, Facebook pages, that kind of thing. So, assignments . . .’

  He blathers, blurts and burbles on.

  I don’t listen. It occurs to me that I’m Reasonably Local and have a history of psychotic mental illness mixed in with plenty of violence.

  No beheading though. No interest in spears. That’s my defence and I’m sticking to it.

  We break up.

  I tell Jon thanks for helping me out with his pen-tappy thing earlier.

  ‘No worries,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Jones likes you much, though.’

  ‘Not so much, no.’

  ‘Hope he doesn’t take over long term.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘From Jackson, I mean. Short term is one thing, but—’

  ‘What?’

  He explains. Jackson is going off on a six-month sabbatical but office rumour says it’s fifty-fifty whether he comes back at all.

  I want to ask how come I don’t know about this when Breakell – and apparently everyone else – does, but then the detective in me notes (1) I never read boring adminy email circulars, no matter what the subject line, and (2) I’ve not always been in the flow of office gossip because, especially recently, I’m often too bored or too irritable to make the effort.

  The detective in me draws the obvious conclusion and takes the prompt and necessary action, which involves running straight to Jackson’s office. He confirms the worst.

  ‘Something I always wanted to do before I got too old. Rent a boat. Float around the Med. Eat properly. Swim. Lose some of this,’ he says, patting his not-very-prodigious belly.

  I’m appalled. Genuinely am. I wait four hundred and fifty-three days for my first proper post-Llanglydwen corpse and Jackson has to go running off to some stupid sailing boat. Like, the man prefers floating around in the sun to finding murderers, and interesting murderers at that.

  I give him my what-am-I-to-do face, complete with hand and arm gestures. If I had a spontaneous expressive dance to match, I’d probably do that too.

  I’ve had only two real, close allies amongst my superior officers, Jackson himself and a senior DI, Rhiannon Watkins. Until about eight months ago, we were, all three of us, working on a major enquiry. An enquiry that I initiated and christened: Operation April.

  We had our hands, almost, on a conspiracy so broad and ambitious it took the breath away. And, after a lot work, we secured the evidence that allowed us to bug a major planning session held by the chieftains of that conspiracy.

  The meeting took place in summer last year. The setting: a German Schloss-turned-luxury-hotel planted on a windy North Sea coast.

  There were six men present. Their names: Owain Owen, Ben Rossiter, David Marr-Phillips, Nick Davison, Idris Prothero, Trevor Yergin. Two of those men – Rossiter and Prothero – are certainly crooks. Rossiter directed a nasty and violent series of kidnaps. Prothero set up a weapons-smuggling enterprise that we busted wide open, only for the damn thing to turn ‘legal’ at the last. A scatter of murders were involved in both cases, but nothing we could prove.

  The six men turned up in casual clothes, bringing the rich man’s sporting clutter of golf clubs, tennis rackets and the rest. But they also booked a meeting room, confident in the belief that German privacy laws and their own extraordinary security prowess would make it safe for them to talk openly.

  Their confidence was misplaced. We had recently been able to provide the Bundeskriminalamt – the German FBI, effectively – with evidence that enabled them to bug the fuck out of that meeting room. Audio, video. The meeting room the restaurant, the men’s bedrooms. Everything.

  And we almost got them. That’s the thing. We almost got them.

  They turned up to their precious meeting room. Faddled around with teas and coffees and sparkling mineral water. Then one of them – Marr-Phillips – said, ‘Well, we’ll get started, shall we? A couple of apologies for absences – you know who I mean – but we’ve got enough people here to work with. We’ll run everything as normal. Review current investments, then discuss any new enterprises any of us might wish to bring to the group’s attention. Who wants to go first? Ben, maybe you? Your Russian millionaire farming scheme hit some bumps recently. You were going to look at restarting, maybe?’

  Millionaire farming scheme: a nasty, nasty kidnap operation that ran for years until we broke it. The man behind it, until now, untouched and untouchable.

  Jackson, Watkins and I crouched like beasts around the speakers transmitting that conversation. Stared at the video like we could burn our way through it.

  They were about to divulge everything. We were about to capture every last one of those fuckers. Convict them using their very own words from their very own mouths.

  And then—

  A man came into the room. Didn’t enter, even. Just hovered in the doorway, where our cameras couldn’t quite pick him up. He said, very distinctly, ‘I don’t think we’ll be going swimming today.’

  All the faces i
n the room swivelled.

  The man repeated his sentence. Distinctly, forcefully. In a way that brooked no dissent, no interruption.

  It was twenty-eight degrees Celsius outside and a perfect day for swimming.

  And from that moment – nothing. Rossiter’s millionaire farming scheme was dropped and never mentioned again. The men just knocked listlessly around their meeting room for twenty minutes, talking about golf or travel arrangements.

  Then left.

  Played golf. Ate. Drank. Swam. Walked on the beach. A couple of them donned wetsuits and did some windsurfing thing.

  Just that. For the whole weekend.

  The German BKA were good to us. They tested the limits of the laws constraining them by keeping the surveillance active until the very last. But not once, not once, did the conspirators breathe a single word of their conspiracy. That little snippet of Marr-Phillips’s the only quasi-useful fragment we secured.

  And then—

  Nothing.

  Our operation collapsed. It had run a long time. Generated nothing. Soaked up resources that were better used elsewhere. After being reprieved once before, this time it enjoyed no second chances.

  The budgetary plug was finally, decisively pulled.

  A few months later, Detective Inspector Rhiannon Watkins – a fiercely excellent detective, feared and respected in equal measure – was headhunted. Went off to lead the Major Crimes unit in Dyfed-Powys’s Carmarthen Headquarters. She’s a detective chief inspector now and will soon, I’m sure, make it to superintendent.

  But Carmarthen has no major crimes. If a hay lorry gets stolen, that’s a big deal in Dyfed-Powys. Watkins has essentially – my view – abandoned serious policing in favour of a nice pay rise and a comfortable life with her delightful wife, Cal.

  All that’s background. The failed story of my life in CID. But the thing that appals me now is that, having lost Operation April and lost DI Watkins, I may now also lose Dennis Jackson.

  That would be a threefold loss I almost couldn’t bear.

  I try to squeeze all that into my face. My arm and hand gestures. The spontaneous expressive dance that, alas, didn’t quite come in time.

  Jackson rubs his face. A weary rub.

  ‘Fiona, look. Bleddyn Jones is a perfectly good copper. He’s a bit by-the-book maybe, but the book is there for a reason. I suggest you do your work, add your tuppence worth, and trust that ordinary police procedures will get there in the end.’

  I give him my pained look.

  He gives me his what-do-I-care-I’m-going-on-sabbatical look.

  Our looks wrestle for a moment. Then, in a sort of matter/anti-matter thing, they just go pop and disappear.

  I leave.

  Leave-leave.

  Go home.

  Smoke one joint angrily, then a second one slowly. The second one is where the thinking happens.

  Forwards, backwards: two ways to view this case. Forwards, backwards. Forwards, backwards.

  I can’t get the pieces to line up in a forwards direction, which means that the backwards one has to take priority.

  But the backwards thing is aiming at what exactly? What lies at the dark and mercenary heart of this whole thing? I don’t know.

  My thoughts dissipate, swirl, regather.

  I suggest you do your work, add your tuppence worth, and trust that ordinary police procedures will get there in the end.

  What did Jackson mean by that? I mean, really?

  The surface meaning is plain enough. He was saying, ‘Do whatever Bleddyn the Blitherer tells you to do.’ Except that Jackson knows me well. When he said ‘add your tuppence worth’, I think he was encouraging me to operate the way I operate best. A little more entrepreneurially than Jones would like. A little more imaginatively.

  I think about smoking a third joint, but decide I’m done at two.

  Sitting outside in a pale April sunshine, I fetch my laptop.

  Open a browser.

  Search ‘Tor’.

  Wikipedia tells me, ‘Tor is free software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is an acronym derived from the original software project name The Onion Router.’

  I read for a while, then open a new browser page and type ‘Agora’.

  Wikipedia again: ‘Agora is a darknet market operating in the Tor network . . . After Evolution closed in an exit scam in March 2015, Agora replaced it as the largest darknet market.’

  I read on, but then am troubled by a further thought. Click around online. Medical stuff this time. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

  Find what I need. What I more than half-expected. But this little puff of thought blows further than mere diagnosis. It blows all the way to a dead woman’s corpse.

  I pick up my keys and leave the house.

  12

  Katie’s not home, but I’m sitting in my car, wondering whether to call or wait, when I see her coming round the corner.

  Ski stick. Shopping bag. And, unless I’m making it up, something drawn in her face. Taut. Pained.

  I watch for a moment, then hop out of the car. Go bounding over to Katie just as she arrives at her front door. She puts her ski stick and shopping down. Gets her key. Leans against the wall as she unlocks. We say hi.

  I pick up the bag and reach for the stick.

  ‘I’ll get that,’ I say.

  Katie, with that sudden ferocity of hers, says, ‘I think I can get it for myself, thank you, slave.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘You want to help me in?’

  ‘Katie, I don’t think you killed Gaynor Charteris and nor do my colleagues. But you are the person who worked with her most closely in recent weeks and I can’t rule out the possibility that you have some connection, even unwittingly, with Charteris’s killers. So yes, I am happy to help you inside and upstairs with your bag, but I am also professionally curious to see where you live on the off-chance that I might learn something of value to the investigation. It was as a detective that I came here this evening, not as a friend.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Hairy-arse.’

  She opens the door. Goes inside. Leaves bag and ski stick for me to pick up. I watch her from behind. Her gait. That unevenness that comes and goes.

  The house is a student-share but, Katie tells me, her housemates are all post-graduate women and the house therefore lacks the stink, disorder and unhygiene which marks the true student house.

  We put the food away, then go upstairs. Katie’s room.

  She makes nice, sort of.

  I don’t see anything that tells me about Charteris’s killers, but I do see something that I more than half-expected to find: a book, titled Living with MND, on the top of the reading pile by her bed.

  I sit on the bed. Shift the book.

  Say, ‘How long, Katie? Since your diagnosis, I mean.’

  She looks at me, gapes, then bursts into tears.

  Normally that word ‘burst’ doesn’t really fit. People might crumple a little, or sob, or pat their eyes. But Katie bursts. Throws her head up, her chin back, and tears actually fly outwards as she does so. And there are sobs, yes, but these are darker, deeper: the howls of some fierce animal caught in a trap. A fox with a shattered leg, a stag with the press of a bullet between his shoulders.

  I let her cry. When she tries to ask the ‘how did you know?’ question – but can’t because she’s still too busy yowling – I say, ‘Your foot, your gait, your breathing. Your attitude, too. Those things had to amount to something, so I fooled around online and made a guess.’ I gesture at the MND book – MND: Motor Neurone Disease. ‘When I saw that, I knew I was right.’

  Katie cries with the energy of the newly dying.

  MND kills most people within about three years of onset. Stephen Hawking, the disease’s most famous sufferer, is also that rarest of rare exceptions: someone who survived its ravages. If Katie’s disease follows its normal progression, she will gradually lose control over her hands and
feet, legs and arms. She will become unable to eat, walk, talk or swallow. Eventually she will be unable to breathe without mechanical assistance and then, shortly afterwards, she will die.

  Katie is twenty-three years old and could have expected to live to eighty years or more.

  She cries, then chokes, because the crying has been too much for her failing musculature, then cries again because the choking is a bleak reminder of what lies ahead.

  I go downstairs, make tea, bring it back.

  And as I stand over the kettle, feeling the heat gathering in my fingertips, hanging my face over the spout to feel the rising warmth, I suddenly become aware of a sudden pop, a vanishing. Like, without even moving, I’ve suddenly crossed from one world into another, a world entirely like the one I just left, but without feeling. Without sound or smell or taste or feel.

  I still see the kettle. Still know I’m standing there. But that’s all: it’s knowledge without participation. Without membership.

  Because I’m dealing with this sudden transition, I’m slow to remember the logic of where I am: fingers clasped around a heating kettle, face hanging over its spout. It’s literally only as the world blurs with steam that I connect everything up: the kettle is boiling, I should move my face, my fingers.

  Move them I do. Then stand unsure what to do next.

  I think: tea. I came here to make tea.

  I make two cups of tea. Peppermint for me. Ordinary caffeinated stuff for Katie. She prefers coffee, I think, but I never really know how to make coffee, so tea it will be.

  Then think again: Tea. Kettle. Steam. Fingers. Pain.

  I don’t have pain, or don’t think I do, but I look at my fingers and see that they’re brightly, angrily red at the tips.

  This puzzles me. It all puzzles me. The evidence that lies, literally, at my fingertips speaks of scalding. Of pain. Of bodily injury. But try as I might, I can’t find any trace of sensation that joins up, that makes sense of the available data.

  For a while, I stand unsure of what to do. Then, a voice in my head, a police voice with first aid training, says, ‘You have to put your hands under cold water.’

  So I do. I obey the voice. Plunge those scalded fingertips beneath the cold tap. Wait for something to happen. A feeling of cold. A feeling of pain. A feeling of something healed.