The Janus Stone

CHAPTER 8

On the Woolmarket Street site, amongst the bulldozers, Ruth is digging. She works almost in a trance. The sun is warm on her back and, in the distance, she can hear Ted and Trace talking about last night’s football. But as far as Ruth is concerned they could be on another planet. Her whole being is concentrated on the skeleton under the doorway. She has levelled off the area above the bones so that the backbone is visible. The body is crouched down, knees curled up, arms around legs. It is now clear that the head is definitely missing although Ruth will have to examine the bones before she can tell if decapitation was the cause of death.

Now, gingerly, she climbs above the trench and photographs the skeleton from another angle. A measuring pole lies beside the bones. The body, bent round as it is, is less than a metre long. A child’s body, thinks Ruth, though she has to be careful. Could be an adult of restricted growth – again the bones will contain the answer.

There will have to be a post-mortem; that’s standard for any human remains. Ruth will examine the bones at the same time. She is used to the process but she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like the sterile atmosphere, the casual jokes of the pathologists, the smell of formaldehyde and Dettol. She remembers what Erik used to say: ‘The earth is kindly. She shelters us, she protects us, to her we must return.’ Ruth is taking these bones out of the kindly earth and she feels guilty. Erik was once the person Ruth looked up to most in the world but the Saltmarsh case forced her to see him, and many other things, in a different light. Now Erik is dead, his ashes burnt on a dark Norwegian lake, and Ruth has a job to do. She brushes the earth away from the exposed ribcage. In an adult the pelvis and ribs will give clues about the body’s sex. In a pre-pubescent this is almost impossible to judge. Exposed now in the chalky earth, this skeleton looks heart-breakingly small.

‘How are you doing?’ It is Irish Ted, peering over the lip of the trench like Mr Punch.

‘Not bad. Skeleton’s almost exposed. Just got a few more drawings to do.’

‘We’ve found something. Want to see?’

Ruth straightens up. Sometimes she feels faint if she gets up too quickly but today she seems miraculously well. Maybe it’s the famous second trimester, where, according to the books, you look ‘blooming’ and have tremendous energy and a renewed sex drive. Sounds fun, thinks Ruth as she follows Ted through the maze of walls and trenches. Something to look forward to at any rate.

At the back of the house some outhouses still remain, their doors hanging crazily, windows smashed. There is also the remains of a conservatory, a skeletal wood frame that still retains a few unbroken panes. As Ruth passes, a workman is systematically smashing the glass. One window obviously contained stained glass, red and blue and yellow. The shards scatter at Ruth’s feet like a rainbow.

She follows Ted past the outhouses and into the grounds. Here the new buildings are going up quickly; neat squares of brick and plasterboard. She steps over a cucumber frame, the glass smashed to powder, and passes a tree with a frayed rope hanging from one of its branches. A swing? Broken flagstones form a rudimentary path through the mud. The noise of the cement mixers is deafening.

As directed by Ruth, Ted has dug new trenches along the boundaries of the site, next to the high flint wall. In one of these, Trace is standing, wearing a pink T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Killer Barbie’.

Ruth looks into the trench. A tiny skeleton lies exposed about a metre below the topsoil. Only this time it is definitely not human.

‘What is it?’ shouts Ruth, above the noise of the machinery.

‘A cat, I think,’ says Ted.

‘Pet cemetery?’

‘Maybe, though I haven’t seen any others.’

They haven’t found any human bodies either which, given that this was supposed to be a churchyard, is surprising. Disappointing, the county archaeologist would say. Maybe the site was cleared by the Victorians. It wouldn’t be the first archaeological site they had ruined. Ruth looks at the bones protruding from the mud. From the shape of the tail, she is pretty sure that it is feline.

‘Family pet?’ she suggests, thinking of Flint.

‘Yes…’ Ted looks at her sideways. ‘Except…’

‘What?’

‘It’s headless.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no head. Trace and I are both sure.’

Ruth looks again at the bones. She can see the vertebrae and the tail wrapped neatly around the feet but… no head.

‘Log it,’ she says. ‘I’ll take the bones back to the lab.’

‘Wonder what we’ll find next?’ says Ted cheerily. ‘The Headless Horseman?’

Ted’s good humour, thinks Ruth, as she trudges back to her trench, is starting to get her down.

In the afternoon, Clough puts in an appearance. ‘The boss has gone down to Sussex to interview some priest who used to run this place,’ he explains.

‘Pin it on the pervert priest,’ says Ted, taking a swig from his flask, ‘good idea.’

Ruth feels rather embarrassed that she and the others have been caught on their tea break but Clough joins them readily enough, accepting a Jammy Dodger from Trace and a mug of coffee from Ruth. They are sitting on a low internal wall, still covered with wallpaper, dark red with a faint black pattern.

‘Boss turns out to be a left-footer,’ says Clough. ‘Did you know that?’ he turns to Ruth.

‘A left…? Oh, a Catholic. No. Why should I?’ She doesn’t want Clough to think she knows Nelson all that well.

‘We’ve found some other people who worked here. Ordinary people, not priests or nuns. Even tracked down some of the residents. It’s going to be a hard job taking all the statements.’

‘Won’t you get overtime?’ asks Ruth drily.

‘Oh yes,’ Clough grins, ‘thank God for overtime. Anyway, you find out any more about the skeleton?’

‘No,’ says Ruth patiently. ‘As I explained yesterday, I need to examine it thoroughly in context before we can take the bones away.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘I’m hoping to finish tomorrow. I’ve got to bag and record all the bones and take soil samples.’

‘That long? Just for a few bones?’

‘There are two hundred and six bones in the human body,’ says Ruth tartly, ‘and about three hundred in a child’s.’

‘Oh well.’ Clough stands up, brushing crumbs from his chinos (like Nelson, he wears plain clothes – very plain in Nelson’s case). ‘Better get back to the ranch. No peace for the wicked.’

A cliché, like many of Clough’s utterances but as Ruth goes back to work in her trench she finds the phrase reverberating in her mind. No peace for the wicked. Were these bones at peace? Is she now disturbing them? Did something wicked happen here, however many years ago? Did somebody kill this child? And what about the cat?

No peace for the wicked. Cathbad would say that places retain memories of evil. This site is spooky enough, with its half-ruined Gothic walls, its grandiose arch, the staircases and doors leading to nowhere. Cathbad would also say that Ruth should be careful, disturbing the dead, meddling with the past. But that is her job. She is a forensic archaeologist. It is her job to excavate the body and discover clues from the bones, from the burial, from the very texture of the earth. It is all very straightforward and there is nothing to get excited about.

Nevertheless, when the light starts to fade and Ted and Trace pack up their tools, Ruth goes with them. Being sensible is one thing; staying on the site after dark is another.