A rain shower comes and goes, but doesn’t trouble us.
When we’re ready to leave, we share a pub lunch. Exchange thoughts. Reminiscences.
Katie is blitzing into a new Ph.D. thesis now. Her topic: the most sophisticated antiquities fraud ever to have been studied almost, in effect, from the inside.
She’s aiming to have a first draft completed as soon as possible. She can’t type two-handed, but she’s got a voice recognition thing that works well, and her left hand is still fine for when she needs it.
She thinks she’ll claim her doctorate before her illness claims her life. If anyone can do it, she can.
We have a nice day. Drive home. My house, not Katie’s.
I take her up to my spare room.
She says, ‘What’s this?’
I tell her.
Say that she can’t go on living in a shared student house, especially not when her room is on the first floor and there’s no disability support at all. I tell her she should live here. Say we’ll go and collect her stuff tomorrow.
She sits on the bed, blinking.
‘But Fi, this is your home. I couldn’t—’
‘You can. I’m inviting you.’
‘And anyway—’
Those anyways. Those tedious anyways.
My house isn’t much better arranged than her house-share for disability. Bedroom and bathroom upstairs. Too complicated. Too difficult. Blah blah.
‘Katie, who cares? We just put in a stairlift. Or a downstairs shower. Or whatever.’
I shrug. Her parents want the best for Katie and Katie still wants to live and work independently. Disability and an oncoming death will, one day, drive her back to her parents’ Chiltern paradise, but Katie should herself choose the timing of that return. In the meantime, if Katie wants to live with me, then her parents can fork out a few grand for a stairlift. Or a shower. Or whateverthehell. I don’t care. When Katie is no longer living here, I’ll put everything back the way it was, and her parents can pay for that too.
Katie says, ‘I’ll be in your way.’
‘No you won’t.’
‘There’s no reason you should give up your life to look after me.’
‘I’m not going to give up my life and I’m not going to look after you. If you want nurses, get nurses.’
I sound snappish. I know I do. So I add more gently, ‘And Katie, you should be with friends. I’m your friend. You should be here.’
She should. And she knows it. And she says yes. And she cries.
I can’t cry – it’s just something my eyes have chosen never to do – but we hold each other, and that feels nice. Being dead, I think, is easy, but the whole journey there can be mighty taxing. We each find our own dark path into that land of stone and shadow.
When we’re done, Katie punches my arm quite hard, and says, ‘Best slave ever. Best slave ever.’
I punch her back, but softly. My warrior princess. My dying queen.
She’s tired and goes to bed.
I feel pleased. I like Katie and it feels right having her here. Right for her and right for me.
But also scared.
Living with a woman who is dying, slo-mo, in front of me? Sharing a house with someone whose mere presence has already, twice, sent me shivering back to that place of dissociation and emptiness? That place of living death.
I’m scared enough that I actually go to the kitchen. Run the tap. First hot, then cold, then again hot.
Put my hands beneath the silver water and check. Yes, that’s hot. That’s cold.
I feel the difference. Feel myself.
I think, Living with Katie will, at times, drive me out of my mind. I will lose myself. Vanish into the void. But that’s OK. I can endure that. I can survive that. And if I do, then I can survive anything. I will, almost literally, have nothing more to fear.
That’s a pep talk more than a set of beliefs, but for now the pep talk will have to do. And, I notice, I don’t actually have any doubts about inviting Katie to live here. That part, certainly, feels right.
I make peppermint tea.
Turn the lights off, almost completely. The ground floor is now lit only by a street lamp burning outside and the electronica miscellanea of any modern house: an oven clock, stand-by lamps, the router’s green wink.
It is 9 July 2016.
I take a blank sheet of paper and take it over to the kitchen table.
Write the number eleven. A large outline that fills the page.
Colour the outline in. Not particularly neatly. But not too messily either.
Big. Black. Obvious.
Add the page to a pile of ten similar pages, that count down from ten to one.
On the bottom page of the pile, a simple message:
28 June 2016
Alden Gheerbrant
RIP
Eleven days since my most recent corpse. I hope I don’t have to wait another 453 days for the next one.
To the topmost page, I add a little doodle. A flower. Red head, red petals.
No reason for the doodle. Just feeling doodly.
I drink my tea. Go upstairs. Listen briefly at Katie’s door. I can’t hear anything, which means, I presume, the princess is sleeping. I go to my bedroom and do the same.
THE END
Author’s Note
So. You’ve finished the book and, I’d guess, you’re likely to have two thoughts, or questions, uppermost in your mind.
The first is: Arthur – really? Do we have to take him seriously as a historical figure, or does the whole Arthur myth have as little historical reality as Alex Devine’s faked-up sword?
The second question is simply: this book – really? Fiction is fiction, OK, but doesn’t an author have some kind of duty not to strain the bounds of credibility? And if so, then doesn’t a police procedural about Excalibur feel like a step too far?
Good questions both, but we’ll deal with Arthur first.
And I suppose I need to admit, straight out, that if what’s being demanded is courtroom-standard evidence then, no, we can’t be confident of Arthur’s existence. There’s not a single solid, undisputable fact to demonstrate he existed. Even the circumstantial evidence has a mistily uncertain quality. Dates are scarce, sources dubious, archaeological confirmation wholly absent.
But, to be clear, there’s nothing particularly suspect about that. When you are dealing with the history of fifteen centuries back, there are few fixed facts of any sort. So, for example, we do know that a once-Celtic country became dominated by an Anglo-Saxon culture and language. But was that because the invading hordes simply slaughtered and displaced the Celts? Or was it that the Celts gradually came to adopt the culture and tongue of these newcomers? Up until fairly recently, the slaughter-and-displace theory was in the ascendant. These days, the peaceful assimilation hypothesis probably has more adherents. But we don’t actually know either way. Even modern genetic testing hasn’t really settled the matter.
If we can’t be certain about the answers to such huge questions, it makes sense to drop any demand for courtroom standard of proof in relation to Arthur. Forget ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, and ask instead where the balance of probabilities lies. And that question, I reckon, has a rather simpler answer.
The earliest British (Celtic) histories talk about a Battle of Mount Badon. The earliest Anglo-Saxon (English) history does too. The only man ever named as the leader of the British at that battle was Arthur. There does seem to be – modest, arguable, not decisive – evidence that there was a temporary pause in the line of Anglo-Saxon incursion, a pause that could well have been brought about by a major battle of the sort described.
So it seems a little contrary to argue that there wasn’t a battle or that the British leader wasn’t called Arthur. What’s more, the torrent of myth (largely Welsh in its earliest origins) doesn’t discredit the Arthur-as-real-human theory simply because, in that day and age, legend was always likely to accrue around warriors of such stature.
> Finally, there’s that telling nugget which I quote in the text. The poem, Y Gododdin, which Fiona and friends translate in the restaurant, is genuine, all right: you can look it up on Wikipedia. The verse seems to give a broadly historical account of a real historical battle. The battle itself is of no great importance, but the poem contains that crucial throwaway line – the one about how Gwawrddur was a terrific warrior but, no, he wasn’t as good as Arthur. That’s a little like saying David Beckham was a terrific footballer, he was just never as good as Lionel Messi. And why would you even say that, if you knew that your point of comparison – Arthur/Messi – was simply a work of fiction? An invented superhero?
That one line hardly gives us our smoking gun. It’s still a long old way from courtroom proof. But me personally, if I had to place a £100 bet on Arthur’s existence, I’d bet yes. I’d say he was probably real. Probably Welsh. And probably fought a major battle against the Anglo-Saxons. As for the place of that battle – well, I’ve no idea, but Liddington Castle is as plausible a spot as any.
We turn now to this book and this series.
And yes: there’s no question that my storylines can be somewhat exotic and some readers are, I know, in two minds about whether to accept them. The case for the prosecution runs roughly like this. The crime genre is a realist genre. It is there to explore the darker facets of our society. Yes, for sure, it is also there to entertain, so there’ll always be room for a little storyteller’s embroidery. But there are limits. And a hunt for a fake Excalibur simply breaches those limits. No police officer alive has ever encountered a case comparable to the one recounted in this book and that fact simply disqualifies this book from serious consideration as a crime thriller.
And, well, I know what you mean. I really do. And when actual readers have said something similar to me, at festivals and the like, I find myself offering three lines of defence.
The first defence is simple. Crimes like the ones I describe do exist. I didn’t invent the fact that the trade in fake and looted antiquities is huge. It’s a global, multi-billion dollar business and it flourishes everywhere. If you walk the streets of Hong Kong looking for a nice little Ming vase for the mantelpiece, you need to know that at least nine out of ten of the ‘Ming vases’ for sale there are fake – but nobody knows how to tell the fake from the real.
The same is true in Europe too. There are fake artworks, fake statues, fake books, fake everything. I haven’t, as it happened, come across a case involving a fake sword, but the vast majority of quality fakes are never exposed anyway. So in the end, all I’ve done is taken a real-life criminal industry and asked the question: what if fakers turned their hands to ancient Welsh antiquities? And what kind of antiquities might be involved . . .?
My second line of defence turns into attack. I want to ask whether all those other police procedurals are really as realistic as they purport to be. So, for example, there’s a Jo Nesbø novel in which a woman is found murdered, with one finger severed and a diamond, shaped like the devil’s pentagram, secreted beneath her eyelid. Now I’m not having a go at Nesbø – there are any number of novels with similar starting points – but I do want to ask: do crimes like that ever actually happen? Have you ever read of one? Has any living police officer actually encountered such a thing?
I want to say no, never. And are such novels really exploring the dark side of our society? Or are they just having some good old-fashioned fun? Where you stand on such issues is, I’m aware, a matter of personal taste as much as anything – but, for my part, I find it hard to see that my tale of fake antiquities is any less realistic than Nesbø’s tale of diamond pentagrams. On the contrary: my story simply adds some Arthurian juice to what is already a very well-established criminal enterprise. There just isn’t a criminal enterprise involving eyelids and devil’s pentagrams.
And all that sounds good, I hope. Convincing.
But in the end, I know that I’m not being completely honest. Yes, my plots aren’t as wacky as they look. And yes, there are plenty of more standard crime novels with plots that don’t really pass any strict reality check either. But my third line of defence, and the real heart of it, is this.
There are, to my mind, two great poles in crime fiction. The first of those – of course! – is Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, a more-than-human mastermind, solving crimes that were darkly, gothically bizarre. No reader of Conan Doyle’s ever mistook Holmes’s casebook for a careful analysis of late Victorian criminality; they were just wonderfully intoxicating, stimulating fun.
And because Holmes was so European, so gothic, so bizarre, so unworldly, it was perhaps inevitable that the reaction, when it came, would be centred in the New World – and not just anywhere, but in its sunniest, brashest, Westernmost city, Los Angeles. Raymond Chandler got his private eye to walk the same mean streets that his readers encountered for themselves. Not for him any mysterious hounds, or exotic poisons, or bizarrely well-trained serpents. Chandler wrote about crimes that felt real, populated by criminals who felt alive.
Chandler’s revolution pretty much demolished that older tradition. The great, recent American crime writers (Elmore Leonard, Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly and the like) all write, or wrote, in a broadly Chandlerian tradition, not a Holmesian one. The same is largely true of most European crime writing too (think of Ian Rankin, or Henning Mankell, or Tana French, and most others you care to mention.)
And that’s fine. I love Chandler and I love the tradition he created . . . but I love Sherlock Holmes too.
So the real, naked truth about my stories is this. I know they’re exotic. I know Fiona is almost too good to be true. But I love that! I relish the fun and the freedom and that sense that you never quite know where the story will end up.
Now, to be sure, because the Chandlerian tradition is so very strong, I use it as a cloak. So I’ve made sure Fiona is a police officer, because in peaceable Britain private eyes don’t have much to do. The police force she works in looks roughly like a real police force does (and I’ve had a fair number of serving and retired officers telling me that, yes, I’ve got the flavour about right.) My crimes, though exotic, do indeed have a firm basis in reality. I make no use of magic. Nothing superhuman. The various technologies and techniques do all exist and are in widespread use.
But . . .
It’s a cloak. A Chandlerian cloak. My books, at their heart, look more towards Sherlock Holmes than Philip Marlowe. And that’s why Fiona feels that bit other-worldly. Why the crimes have an extravagance that even Nesbø’s lack. It’s why the story-architecture for the whole series has more than a whiff of the Holmes-Moriarty battle.
You may like that or you may not like that. It’s entirely your choice. But if you like my stories but find yourself feeling a little uncomfortable with some of the storylines, I think I know the reason why. You’ve been trained to like Raymond Chandleresque realism and to believe that that’s what crime fiction is all about. What it has to be all about. And then along comes Fiona Griffiths, who messes about with those ideas. However much she pretends to play along with the disciplines of the modern police procedural, she’s really got her feet firmly planted in the fogs of a certain house in Victorian-era Baker Street and, somewhere on a far-distant moor, we sense the footprints of a gigantic hound . . .
We started with two questions and I’ve given you two (over-lengthy) answers. But that’s it from me. I do hope you enjoyed the book. If you did, then I’d love you to review it on Amazon, or anywhere else. I read all those reviews and I know that other readers really benefit from them too. It’s a great thing you do for other readers – even a line or two helps.
I hope too that you’ll feel motivated to explore the series more fully. The listing in the back of this book gives you a chance to check you’ve got everything. Do take a look and grab anything that takes your fancy.
And finally – are you a member of the Fiona Griffiths Readers Club? And if not, don’t you think you should be? You get some free stor
ies to download (ones that are available nowhere else) and every now and then you’ll get an email from me telling you when I have a new book ready for release. You can sign up here. It’s as easy as pie and I look forward to welcoming you.
I have the best readers in the world. I’m a lucky author.
HB
Oxfordshire, England
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Make sure you’ve read the other books in the series
TALKING TO THE DEAD #1
Fiona Griffiths is the youngest, most junior detective on the South Wales Major Crimes Unit. And when a young mother and her six-year-old daughter are found dead in a squalid Cardiff squat, Fiona is given a minor-seeming task to perform. She performs that task – sometimes following the rules, sometimes not so much – and starts to uncover a much wider and more brutal crime.
That crime is finally solved, in blood, on a remote Pembrokeshire coast. And the reader learns just who this detective is . . . and quite why she’s so interested in corpses.
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The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 39