The Janus Stone

by Elly Griffiths

  Ruth gives up all pretence at courage. Holding the torch out in front of her, she runs headlong down the hill. No longer the careful vehicle for her baby, she is now a terrified woman running for cover. The baby will just have to put up with it. She stumbles and almost falls. Oh God, where’s her car? But then she sees the comforting lights of the Phoenix and knows she is heading in the right direction. Panting hard, she covers the rest of the distance at a canter. Her car is there. Her lovely trusty, rusty car. Then she stops; her blood freezing.

  A dark shape is beside by her car. A man.

  Ruth screams.

  ‘Ruth? It’s OK. It’s me.’ It is Max Grey.

  Ruth hears someone still screaming and realises, to her embarrassment, that it is her. ‘Max,’ she gasps. He is by her side, putting an arm round her. He smells of wood-smoke and soap. ‘Ruth? What is it?’

  ‘Someone… someone up at the site… my name… on a wall…’

  ‘What?’

  Ruth takes a deep breath, holding on to Max’s arm to steady herself. ‘I was up at the site… having a look. I saw someone had written… written my name on a wall. Then I thought someone was there, watching me. I heard them breathing. Silly, I know.’

  She can’t see Max’s face in the darkness but she feels his arm stiffen. His voice when it comes, though, is calm and reassuring. ‘Why don’t I go up and have a look? You stay here. Sit in your car, put the heater on. You’re shivering. Hang on.’

  He turns away and Ruth sees now that the Range Rover is parked beside her Renault. He comes back with a thick jumper and a flask. ‘Here, put this on.’ She puts on the jumper, it smells comfortingly of musty wool. She opens her car door and climbs inside. Max hands the flask in after her. ‘Have a swig. I’ll be right back.’

  Ruth takes a tentative sip. Black coffee. All drinks taste odd at the moment but this is something different. After a second, she realises it has whisky in it.

  Max is back after a few minutes. He leans in through the window.

  ‘Are you OK to drive home? I’ll follow you.’

  *

  For the first time Ruth is relieved to see the security light come on as she opens her gate. Right now, she wants as much light as she can get. She opens the front door, hoping her sitting room is not too untidy.

  Max Grey, though, does not seem to notice the papers all over the floor or even the dirty washing on the sofa. He strokes Flint, admires her books and her collection of arrowheads and accepts the offer of tea with every appearance of pleasure. It is only when they’re sitting down with their tea (the washing hastily stowed away in the kitchen) that they talk about the events on the site.

  ‘Was anyone there when you first arrived?’ asks Max.

  ‘No. It was completely deserted. Phil wanted me to get some soil samples, and I just thought I’d have a look at the trenches – you’ve done loads of work – and then I saw those… those words.’

  ‘You said you thought you heard someone…’

  ‘Yes, I heard noises very near me… someone breathing. I don’t know. I could have imagined it. Did you see anyone?’

  Max is silent for a second and then he says, ‘I saw a shape, maybe a dog or even a large fox. Nothing else.’

  ‘A dog.’ Ruth is so relieved that she laughs. ‘That explains the panting then.’

  ‘Yes.’ But Max doesn’t smile back. He frowns down into his cup.

  ‘Have you any idea who could have done this?’ asks Ruth. ‘I mean none of your students knows me from Adam. And to go to the trouble of sneaking up to the site with a pot of red paint-’

  Max looks up. ‘I don’t think it was paint.’

  ‘What-’ It takes a few seconds for Ruth to realise what he means and then a few more for her to be able to frame the word. ‘Blood?’

  Max nods, ‘I think so, yes. We can check tomorrow.’

  ‘But why…’ Ruth’s voice is rising, ‘why would anyone write my name on a wall in blood?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Max says again. Then, ‘Ruth, have you ever read I, Claudius?’

  Surprised Ruth says, ‘Yes, I think so. A long time ago. It’s by Robert Graves, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. You’re too young to remember but there was a terrific TV series years ago. Derek Jacobi and Siân Phillips.’

  In fact Ruth does remember though she is flattered that Max thinks she is too young. The programme was past her bedtime but she remembers the opening credits: a snake gliding slowly over a Roman mosaic. Her parents used to say that it was disgusting (‘a waste of our licence fee. I’m going to write to Mary Whitehouse’) but Ruth had a strong suspicion that they used to watch it after she had gone to bed.

  ‘What about it?’ she asks.

  Max sighs. ‘In the book, the child Caligula kills his father, Claudius’s brother Germanicus. He does it by, quite literally, scaring him to death.’

  Ruth is silent, thinking of the snake moving across the floor. This whole thing has suddenly taken on a surreal tinge, as if she is acting in her own TV drama, quite unreal, the disturbing images existing only to shock the more sensitive viewers.

  ‘He did it,’ says Max, ‘by exploiting Germanicus’s superstitions. He stole his lucky talisman, a green jade figure of Hecate. He left animal corpses around the house, cocks’ feathers smeared in blood, unlucky signs and numbers written on the walls, sometimes high up, sometimes,’ he looks at Ruth, ‘sometimes very low down, as if a dwarf had written them. Then Germanicus’s name appeared on the wall, upside down. Each day, one of the letters disappeared. On the day that only a single G remained, Germanicus died.’

  There is a silence. Flint jumps on the sofa, purring loudly. Ruth buries her hand in his soft amber fur.

  ‘Do you really think,’ she says at last, ‘that someone is trying to scare me, by using an idea they found in I, Claudius?’

  Max shrugs. ‘I don’t know but it was the first thing that came to my head. And when you think about the dead cockerel…’

  ‘So we’re looking for a deranged Robert Graves fan?’

  Max laughs. ‘Or someone addicted to classic TV. I don’t know, Ruth. What does seem clear is that someone is trying to scare you.’

  ‘To warn me off the Norwich site?’

  ‘Possibly. It’s no secret that you’re involved. You had quite a high profile in that other case, didn’t you? The Lucy Downey case.’

  Ruth is silent. She had tried to keep as low a profile as possible (only Nelson knew, for example, that it was she, not the police, who had found Lucy) but she supposes that things always leak out. In any case, it would not be hard to work out that she, as head of Forensic Archaeology, would be involved in both cases.

  ‘They’ll have to work harder than that to scare me,’ she says at last.

  Max smiles. ‘Good for you.’ There is another silence, a rather different one this time. Then he says, almost shyly, ‘Ruth. Will you have dinner with me? One day next week. Not at the Phoenix. Somewhere nicer.’

  Ruth looks at him, sitting at ease on her sagging armchair, his long legs folded under him. Beside her, Flint’s purrs increase. She shouldn’t say yes. She is a pregnant woman. She doesn’t need this sort of complication. Max smiles at her. She notices, for the first time, that one of his front teeth is slightly chipped.

  ‘All right,’ she says, ‘I’d like to.’

  When he has gone, Ruth is so tired that she goes straight to bed without even checking that Flint has enough food for the night (he wakes her up later to remind her about this). Lying on her bed, she can still hear Max’s Range Rover driving slowly along the narrow road. Ten minutes later, her security light comes on again. But Ruth does not get up.

  19th June Festival for Minerva

  I must get organised. I must not act ex abrupto. So – I have my knife which is honed now to a serviceable edge. I have the axe which will do later for the head. I have been wondering if I need some form of anaesthetic, to prevent the child from crying out. The difficulty is to obtain such things. The d
entist might help, he is an intelligent man, at the cutting edge of science. I could easily explain my need for chloroform as a wish to carry out a scientific experiment at school.

  She, as ever, is the problem. She never leaves the child alone. I must ask her – no, order her (I am the Master after all) – to leave the infant alone in the afternoons. Surely she has chores she should be doing about the place.

  I have only a week or so in which to act. The trouble is that sometimes I am weak and the gods give me terrible dreams. I wake up sweating and crying – shameful. But I will not be distracted. I have begun to fast in order to purify the flesh. All must be in readiness.

  CHAPTER 16

  The DNA results show that the body under the doorstep is a girl. The post-mortem confirmed that the child is less than six years old. Father Hennessey, Nelson decides, has some explaining to do.

  This time there is no cosy walk in the grounds. Nelson interviews the priest at the local police station. A car is sent to fetch him and when he arrives Nelson is sitting unsmiling behind a desk. Clough is also in the room and as Hennessey enters Nelson says into the tape machine, ‘Interview commencing at fourteen hundred hours. Present: Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson and Detective Sergeant David Clough.’

  Father Hennessey smiles politely and takes a seat opposite Nelson. He shows no surprise at his hostile reception nor does he make any attempt at small talk. He waits calmly for Nelson’s first question.

  ‘Father Hennessey,’ he’s damned if he’s going to call him ‘Father’ again, ‘you mentioned two children who went missing in 1973.’

  They have looked them up, of course. Nelson was hoping to find Elizabeth Black’s dental records to compare them to the skull but there is no record of Elizabeth ever visiting a dentist. And, after 1973, both children vanish completely.

  ‘Yes,’ says Father Hennessey, looking intently at Nelson.

  ‘Could you tell us a bit more about their disappearance, please?’

  Father Hennessey sighs. ‘It was in the evening. The children had some free time before bed and most of them were playing in the grounds. Supervised, of course. Sister Immaculata called them in about six and there was no sign of Martin and Elizabeth. At first we thought they were just hiding. Martin had a… mischievous sense of humour. But then, after we searched the house and the grounds, we began to get worried.’

  He pauses and Nelson says, ‘When did you call the police?’

  ‘Almost immediately. They searched the house and grounds too. Some of the staff got quite upset. But nothing was found. Then they switched the search to the wider area.’

  ‘Did you search? Personally?’

  Father Hennessey’s pale blue eyes look past Nelson. ‘I searched all night,’ he says at last. ‘The house, the grounds. Then I rode around Norwich on my motorbike, looking in alleyways, abandoned houses, anywhere I thought they might hide.’

  Clough interjects. ‘You had a motorbike?’

  ‘It’s not against the law, you know,’ replies Hennessey mildly.

  ‘And in all this searching,’ Nelson cuts in, ‘did the police ever dig up the grounds?’

  ‘No.’

  Goons, thinks Nelson. They were probably too taken in by this saintly motorbiking priest. They would never assume that he could have killed the children. Well, Nelson is different.

  ‘Did they look in the well?’ he asks.

  Now Father Hennessey looks surprised. ‘No. It was boarded up, cemented over. No child could have fallen down it.’

  Nelson says nothing, playing the silence game. This time he wins.

  ‘Have you found something in the well?’

  ‘We’ve found a child’s skull,’ Nelson tells him. ‘A child of five. A girl.’ ‘Under six’ is what the autopsy report says but he wants to shock Hennessey into saying something indiscreet.

  Father Hennessy certainly looks shocked. His lips move silently, presumably in prayer. He asks, ‘Is it Elizabeth?’

  ‘We don’t know for certain,’ says Nelson, ‘yet.’ He sees no reason to add that they might never know as they have no DNA of Elizabeth’s. But he wants Hennessey to think he will find out. Nelson, the fearless seeker after truth, scourge of wrongdoers.

  ‘How could the skull have got in the well?’ asks Hennessey, still sounding shaken. He takes a sip of water. Suddenly he looks an old man.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Sharper now. Hennessey is pulling himself together.

  Silence again. Clough asks, ‘Did you get on well with Martin and Elizabeth?’ The change of subject, of tone. An old interrogation standby.

  But Hennessey is equal to it. He looks directly at Clough. ‘Yes. They were lovely children, very bright, very loving. They’d had a traumatic time, with their mother dying and were… damaged.’

  ‘Damaged?’ says Nelson sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘These things leave scars, Detective Chief Inspector. Martin was angry, angry with his mother for leaving him, angry with the world for letting it happen. Elizabeth was easier. She was very sad, very insecure. She clung to Martin, refused to be separated from her teddy, that sort of thing. But they were getting over it, slowly. Martin was exceptionally bright. I tried to encourage that. I gave him books to read.’

  ‘What sort of books?’

  ‘All sorts. He was interested in science and history. I gave him books about the Greeks and the Romans. He was fascinated by the idea that the house could have been built on a Roman site.’

  Nelson remembers Ruth’s comments about Roman pottery found on the site. So the priest had known that, even then.

  ‘So you had a close relationship with the children?’

  Again the priest meets his eyes squarely, almost defiantly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the other staff members?’

  ‘Everyone loved Elizabeth. She was a very lovable child. Martin was… Martin was more difficult.’

  ‘We’ve spoken to Sister Immaculata -’

  ‘Have you?’ Hennessey leans forward eagerly. ‘How is she?’

  ‘In reasonable health,’ Nelson replies coldly, ‘mentally unimpaired,’ he adds.

  Hennessey nods. ‘Good. She’s had a hard life, poor woman.’

  Nelson ignores this. ‘She says that Martin was a troublemaker.’

  ‘As I say, he was angry.’

  ‘Did he have uncontrollable rages?’ asks Clough sympathetically.

  For the first time, Father Hennessey looks angry. ‘No, he did not have “uncontrollable rages”.’ His voice puts irritable quotes around the words. ‘Nor did he kill his sister in a fit of demonic temper, as I imagine you’re implying. He loved her. They were exceptionally close.’

  ‘Unnaturally close?’

  ‘No, naturally close. They were a brother and sister with no one else in the world. Don’t you think they would be close?’

  ‘I assume nothing,’ says Nelson. ‘You knew them. I didn’t. I just want to find out who would kill a child and throw its head down a well. Now whoever did that, they were unnatural.’

  Father Hennessey looks at him. ‘Unnatural maybe,’ he says in his quietest voice, ‘evil certainly.’

  The drive home is silent apart from Clough chomping his way through two packets of Hula Hoops. Nelson is conscious that they haven’t really got much further. Father Hennessey had seemed shocked at the discovery of the skull but he had also seemed genuinely surprised. Not surprised enough though to blurt out any confessions. Not that Nelson ever really thought he would; Father Hennessey is a cool customer. Controlled, hard almost, despite the surface warmth. Does this make him a murderer?

  ‘Do you think he did it?’ Nelson asks Clough as they speed through several picturesque villages (‘Kill your speed, not a child!’).

  ‘The priest? Maybe. Easy enough to kill them, hide the bodies and bury them later. The cops didn’t even dig up the grounds.’

  ‘Bloody muppets.’ Nelson grinds his teeth. ‘Do you think there’s anyone still arou
nd from those days?’

  ‘Maybe Tom Henty. You know, the desk sergeant at Lynn. He’s been around for donkeys’ years.’

  ‘Good idea. I’ll talk to him.’

  ‘Do you think Hennessey did it?’ Clough looks curiously at his boss

  ‘I think he’s hiding something,’ says Nelson slowly. ‘Something to do with the children. Maybe he’s covering up for someone.’

  ‘What about that nun? Judy said she was a nutter.’

  ‘No she didn’t. She said she was as sharp as a needle.’

  ‘Same thing. The nun could have killed them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe she abused the little girl and the boy found out.’

  ‘Your mind’s like a tabloid.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s not a compliment. Pretty hard to dispose of the body of a twelve-year-old.’

  ‘If they’re not dead, where are they then?’

  ‘That’s the question. We’ll widen the search. Try to find some relatives in Ireland. Talk to other people from the home. Nine times out of ten, missing people turn up right back where they started. It’s almost as if they can’t keep away.’

  ‘Do you think they’re alive?’

  ‘The boy maybe. He was old enough to look after himself. The girl… I think the girl might be our skeleton.’

  ‘Well, it would be a bit of a coincidence if she isn’t,’ says Clough, probing his empty Hula Hoops packet with a moistened finger, ‘two dead children on one site.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson thoughtfully. He is thinking about the site – it has held a children’s home, a churchyard and maybe even a Roman villa. Who knows how many other incarnations it has had, how many deaths it has witnessed? He shakes himself mentally. What’s the matter with him? He’s starting to think like Cathbad.

  ‘You know what was funny?’ says Clough, finally abandoning his search in the packet. ‘How much he talked about love.’