I grin at him, accepting his answer.
I say, ‘And I don’t think you just “found” me in the back of your car. I don’t believe that.’
He laughs again. Freer in this night, this wind, than I’ve ever seen him in Cardiff.
‘Love, if you want to find stuff out, you’ll need to find it out yourself.’
I nod. I’m OK with that.
‘Just . . .’
I look at him. Asking him with my eyes what that word might mean.
He tells me. Says, ‘Just if you do insist on finding out, don’t do it by halves. Those fuckers are dangerous, dangerous men. You either win completely. Or you’ll lose your life. You can’t go at it half-cock.’
Dad almost never swears: one of the unexpected things about him. But he’s more or less confirmed what I was more or less certain of anyway: that my tangled origins lie in whatever dark dealings my father had with those men – the Rattigans, the Evanses, the Marr-Phillipses and the rest.
I say, ‘I don’t do anything half-cock. You know that.’
Dad’s big arm comes round my shoulder. Crushes me into him. And I’m a seven-year-old girl again. Never been ill. Never seen the inside of a mental hospital. My future nothing but a golden road snaking into a rose-washed infinity.
That, just that, for a moment or five.
Then Dad pulls away. We drive back to Cardiff. Long miles, but nice ones.
I drop Dad and go on home.
I do all the things you’re meant to do.
Shower. Teeth. Change.
And somewhere along the way, for no reason at all, that whole thing happens again. The dissociation. Water running hot or cold over my hands and I can’t tell which or why or what.
I know I’m alone in an empty house.
I’m wearing pale-blue pyjamas and for the moment can’t remember anything else. When did I put them on? Did I buy these things and if so why? Why this pattern, this colour, this anything?
A face moves in a mirror. A pale balloon on a blue pyjama body.
I place the gun, loaded, by my bed. A box of ammo on the floor. Practise a quick snatch in the dark.
There is no reason for this gun. I have no reason to be afraid.
Light off.
Sleep.
14
Sleep, and in the morning, all the joys of Saturday.
A world where I’m meant to stay away from work. Meant to pretend that I have things to do that are better than catching murderers.
So. I clean my house, sort of. Remove things that are fizzy, mouldy, empty, dried-out, or otherwise icky from my fridge. Call friends. Actual human beings who are pleased to hear from me, or make out that they are.
Arrange social things. Swimming with Bev. Accept a drinks thing timidly arranged by Essylt. Invite Ed Saunders and Glossy Jill round to mine for supper.
Ed says, ‘Oh cripes,’ when I say I’ll be cooking, but he says it nicely.
Midday.
Midday, and I’ve been good.
Ticked the cleaning box. The food box. The making-nice-with-humans box. There are a couple of boring boxes unticked, but phooey to them, for dirty laundry ye have with you always, but high-quality murder victims ye have not always.
I fool around on the prison service database. The probation service one.
Get what I need.
Write an address down on the inside of an old chocolate wrapper, then fold it so the address doesn’t show.
Rummage through my wardrobe.
Find an old pair of black jeans, much washed, and one pocket starting to come away at the back.
Boots, worn long enough that the soles are starting to get papery and thin.
A gym T-shirt from the laundry pile and an old jumper worn above. The jumper’s old, but in reasonable nick, but I pick at the elbow till I get a pleasingly sized hole appearing.
Jacket. Bag. A horrible grey scarf I’d forgotten I ever had.
No make-up.
I collect together a few papers – an out-of-date library card, an in-date bus pass, a Post Office savings book, a receipt for something, a letter still in its envelope, two ten-pound notes folded into eighths. Bind those things together using an old black hair-tie and put them in my inside jacket pocket. Add my chocolate wrapper address. Put some actual money in my jeans pocket too: fifty quid, just in case. A tin of stuff to make roll-ups with.
Go to the coach station.
Buy a ticket, one way, for the next coach to London. There’s one leaving in twenty minutes and the journey is advertised as taking three and a half hours, or at least an hour longer than I’d take if I drove.
Ah well.
Buy the cheapest and nastiest sandwich I can find. Tear off the thin plastic film from the top and stuff it in my jacket pocket. Eat the sandwich, or some of it. Drink water from the taps in the ladies’ toilets, even though there’s a sign saying, for some reason, do not drink this water.
Get on the coach. Someone’s left a magazine in one of the seat pockets, a TV listings thing mostly dedicated to soap opera. I read that. Then read nothing. Fields and trees, towns and bridges slide past.
London.
Try to take buses to where I need to be. Make a mess of it and end up walking nearly three miles across north London to correct my errors. At some point it starts raining and I remember why I no longer wear these boots.
On the way, I pass an off-licence. Buy a bottle of Algerian wine for £3.49 which I assume – I don’t know about these things – means it must be really terrible. The shopkeeper, an Algerian, puts the bottle in a plastic bag for me.
I say, ‘And some crisps please,’ and he puts those in a bag too.
I pay.
Keep the change in my pocket, but tuck the notes remaining from my fifty pounds into my boot. Actually take my boot off, shove the money down to the toe, put the boot back on.
Continue.
Arrive at the right address.
A flat over a place that calls itself the Harlesden International Trading Centre. The trading centre has a metal grille over its windows and a grimy plastic sign that says ‘Importers – Distributors – Wholesalers – Household Goods’. Someone has kicked lumps out of the wooden boarding beneath the metal grille. Some graffiti has been there so long it has moss growing on it.
A side alley leads to a door. A selection of buzzers.
I press one that says ‘Mason’. A rain-smeared label written in blue biro.
A voice comes through the buzzer. ‘Yes?’
I hold my head away from the microphone. Mumble something.
‘What? Who’s that?’
I hold my head a bit closer and mumble something that ends with, ‘Steve Mason.’
The voice on the other end mutters something angrily as he pulls back and disconnects. But footsteps come downstairs.
The door opens to reveal a man dressed in jogging bottoms and an old T-shirt. He hasn’t shaved today. Maybe not the day before.
I don’t think he’s guilty of overusing the shower either.
He’s forty-something. Short dark hair. Reasonably lean, but with something compressed about him. Primed for discharge.
I say, ‘Hi.’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you Steve Mason?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hi.’
‘And you are?’
‘I’m Fiona. A friend of Ian Shoesmith’s.’
‘Ian?’
‘Yes.’
Mason’s eyes take me in. Up, down. A proper inspection.
I say, ‘He’s dead. I know that. That’s what you were thinking.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was a friend of his from before, obviously.’
Mason doesn’t reply to that. He’s wondering why I’m here, I imagine, but since it would be easy enough for him to ask and he doesn’t ask, I don’t see why I should help out.
I hold out the plastic bag I’m holding with its bottle of terrible Algerian wine. Say, ‘I brought you this,’ and make a sort of
please expression on my face.
He takes the wine, nods, starts walking back up the stairs.
I follow.
Mason’s room is a bedsit. A real shithole. Two single-paned windows that open out on to the high street below. Grimy net curtains. The room smells of cigarette smoke and male sweat and whatever don’t-even-think-about-it odour is produced by recently watched porn.
A low table holds a laptop, some papers, and a takeaway curry in a foil tray.
My jacket is wet through. I peel it off, almost literally having to unstick its sodden polyester lining from my arms, my back.
I hang it out over the back of a chair. Sit on the chair. Legs together, arms in, not leaning back.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘You’re Fiona?’
Nod.
‘Welsh Fiona?’
Nod.
My accent is distinct enough that you hardly have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out, but I think Mason meant more than that. Which is good. It means Shoesmith mentioned me.
‘I thought you were caught up in all that too,’ Mason says.
‘I was. I just got out.’
Shoesmith: an IT guy who got mixed up in something nasty and ended up being murdered for his troubles. Prior to that career-ending mistake, Shoesmith was partnered up with Mason in a complicated little technology fraud. The scam was busted. Shoesmith was never convicted, but Mason got five years inside, and a criminal bankruptcy on top. He is even now working his way through a post-jail term of probation.
He unscrews the bottle of wine. Finds a glass, a mug.
Rinses the glass in a basin and offers it to me.
I say, ‘I don’t drink.’ Ask for a glass of water instead.
He gives me water.
Stares at me.
Stares at me the way a recently released ex-con does. Stripping me naked. Stretching me out on the bed.
‘Why are you here?’ he asks.
I tell him. Say that I’ve got some stuff I want to sell.
‘So sell it on eBay.’
‘It’s not that sort of stuff.’
This is where Mason ought to tell me that he knows nothing of the darknet. That involvement in that kind of computer activity is an explicit breach of his probation licence. That he’ll need to ask me, please, to leave his room.
He doesn’t say any of that.
Just stands up. Reaches for my jacket and twirls it from the back of my chair. Goes through my pockets. Finds my little hair tie with its wad of goodies. Goes through those things one by one.
Fiona Grey. That’s the name on my Post Office book, my library card. They’re left over from my old undercover identity. I’ve kept the various bits and pieces reasonably up to date. The letter in its white envelope is from a homeless hostel in Cardiff telling me about new out-of-hours access arrangements.
Mason looks at everything, including the letter. Tosses most of it on the table. Keeps the two ten-pound notes.
I say, ‘That’s mine,’ meaning the money.
He says, ‘How do I know you’re not wearing a wire?’
I think, fuck’s sake, this isn’t the 1980s. A modern audio recording device is so small it can easily be inserted into a button. You don’t need wires and gaffer tape and little boxes the size of old-fashioned Sony Walkmen.
But he wants to do the thing. Jerks his head upwards, in a sign that he wants me to do the thing.
So I stand up. Take my jumper off. Roll my T-shirt up above my bra. Face him. Turn round. Turn back. No wire.
Mason points his finger at my chest.
‘Come on, pet. Do it right.’
I lift my bra. Show him. Front and back. No wire.
Get dressed again, under the low gunfire of his gaze.
He thinks about getting me to repeat the rigmarole below the waist, but my jeans are tight enough that they couldn’t conceal much and he contents himself with making me empty out my pockets.
‘So. You want to sell something. Drugs?’
‘I just want to know how it works.’
Mason’s eyes flick around the room. He goes to the window and watches the street outside.
And even as he’s there, holding back the net, looking for watchers in parked cars, re-enacting scenes from movies that have no actual relevance to contemporary police operations, he says, ‘I give you an hour. You give me a blow job.’
‘No. You’ve got my twenty quid.’
‘OK, first hour for twenty. After that . . .’
Mason has a black Dell laptop, not very new-looking, lying in the clutter on the table.
He doesn’t reach for it. Goes out of the room. Does something. Comes back with a glossily new MacBook Pro. Fifteen inch screen. Two grand’s worth of computer, or near enough.
He pings it awake. Connects, I notice, not to the router sitting in the corner of his own room but to the Harlesden International Trading Centre beneath us.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Tor.’
Tor.
The. Onion. Router.
Gateway to the dark web.
Called ‘onion’ because it has a thousand layers of encryption and if law enforcement happens to peel one back, there are nine hundred and ninety-nine still waiting. The system is, even to the intelligence agencies, all but uncrackable.
We don’t work for one hour. We work for eight. Don’t stop until a pinky-orange dawn leaks into the grey streets, their tired shopfronts and their uncollected bags of rubbish.
Mason keeps my money and the wine. He doesn’t get a blow job or anything better than thanks. I think he works with me because he enjoys being expert in something. Because he is in fact very good at this stuff and has few opportunities now to share it.
I am duly grateful. Duly admiring.
And, when I leave, I leave not expert exactly, but proficient. Good enough.
Take the bus back to Cardiff. Back to Cardiff by bus. Sleep curled up over two seats.
Home.
Bath and a joint.
A long bath, a fat joint.
Those things and a mug of peppermint tea and a tin of tuna, eaten straight from the can.
It’s early afternoon, Sunday.
A basket of dirty laundry murmurs at me. My running shoes remind me that they’ve not been used for a few days now. But those things can wait. There’s one more person I need to meet. The only person who’s really central to this case of ours.
Arthur.
King-commander of the Dark Age Britons. A man who fought the invading Anglo–Saxons. Flung them back for a generation or more.
A man whose historical existence has never been proved. Never been certain.
I rush off to Waterstones. Buy all the books I can there. Rush to the library, to Katie’s, to borrow the other things I need. And start work.
Arthur.
Vortigern.
Ambrosius Aurelianus.
Hengist and Horsa.
Old names. Old wars. Old enmities.
At one point, I call Katie to check a particular point about the spread or non-spread of Anglo–Saxon cemeteries across England, she gives me the answer in a quiet, competent voice, then adds, ‘It’s two in the morning. You knew that, did you?’
‘Uh. Sorry.’
‘That’s OK.’ Pause. ‘Do you think you’ll catch them? The people who killed Gaynor?’
‘Yes. Or rather, I’m hoping you will. Or rather, I’m hoping they’ll catch themselves.’
That’s not a helpful answer, I realise, and it kicks off a long pause, silvered and moonlit. The ghost of Katie’s own mortality stalks the space between us, scattering frost and starlight in its trail.
She says, ‘Good luck, slave. And goodnight.’
I turn back to history and the cemeteries of the dead.
15
Monday.
Bleddyn Jones hasn’t yet got that Gmail data but he says, with a carefully managed insouciance, ‘Oh, it’s with California now. I’m expecting it to be actioned first thing in the morning, their tim
e.’
I get that thing I get when people take abstract nouns and turn them into verbs.
I draft a press release. One that solicits ‘any information concerning the theft of antiquities from Dinas Powys’. I mention a possible (‘speculative’) connection with a theft of documents from the cathedral library at Bangor. Also a possible connection with a break-in at Llanymawddwy.
Nowhere do I mention Arthur but, in a deliberately underwhelming section entitled ‘Notes for Editors’, I write:
Antiquities stolen from Dinas Powys include a seal-box lid engraved with the symbol of a bear and crown, and a stone fragment, believed to be from the upper Dyfi valley, near Camlan/Llanymawddwy. The vellum located in the church of Saint Tydecho’s dates from the ninth century. It is believed that the documents stolen from Bangor Cathedral/Saint Tydecho’s may include material of similar or greater antiquity.
That’s all.
Jones approves the release. I get the press office to issue it.
Then poke around on the internet. Find a few Arthurian message boards. The kind of sites where King Arthur fans exchange ideas, projects, theories, chat. I set myself up a fake online identity. Call myself FrenhinesGwenhwyfar, Queen Guinevere. Get a Gmail account in that name.
Then I just stroll around on the message boards. I write, ‘interesting’ or ‘Well, well, well . . .’ or ‘Look what someone dug up.’ Then add a link to the press release we’ve just put out.
Ten minutes. Six forums. Done.
If Charteris was killed in order to send us a message, I think it’s important to let the bad guys know that we’ve heard them loud and clear. It’s OK, guys. We’ve got the picture. No need to cut anyone else’s head off.
For a little while, I try doing some work, some actual proper work, but that doesn’t feel very satisfactory so, before long, I give up.
Go to eBay. Search ‘Antiquities’. Select ‘Roman’ and ‘Celtic’.
And buy stuff.
Some ancient Roman glass. Some beads. A Celtic bronze brooch. Two dozen stones of Whitby jet, probably Romano–Celtic in origin. A tiny silver bell, about the size of an acorn. I have a little buying frenzy, and pay less than £150 in total for the pleasure.
Late that afternoon, I drift by Jones’s office.
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 11