The Janus Stone

CHAPTER 15

‘Are you on your own?’

This is a question with so many layers that Ruth is momentarily struck dumb. She is manifestly on her own as she has presented herself at the hospital without anyone accompanying her. But she is doubly on her own as the father of her child does not even know she is pregnant. She thinks of Nelson as she saw him that morning, at the post-mortem, and tries to imagine him at her side, doting and supportive. No, it just doesn’t work. Even if Nelson did know, even if they were, in some unimaginable way, together, he would still spend his time looking at his watch and longing to be back at the station. What about her mum? She tries to picture her mother, cosy and smiling, offering advice and encouragement, telling her not to do too much and to eat ginger biscuits if she feels sick. No, even less likely. Shona? She would spend all her time flicking her hair about and making eyes at the doctors. Funnily enough, the only person she can actually imagine at her side is Cathbad. At least he’d be kind, although the purple cloak might prove a trifle embarrassing.

‘Yes. I’m on my own.’

The nurse ushers Ruth into a room with a bed and a contraption like a TV screen. Another woman stands by the screen, nonchalantly chewing gum. Ruth is reminded uncomfortably of the autopsy room. Only this time she is the body on the slab. Don’t be morbid, she tells herself. This is a perfectly routine procedure. So is an autopsy, persists the voice inside her head.

The nurse tells Ruth to undo her trousers, and rubs gel onto her stomach. Ruth squirms. She hates being touched on her stomach and avoids massages and beauty treatments like the plague. ‘Relax!’ she remembers a masseuse once saying to her. Eccentric she knows but, for Ruth, having some manicured stranger kneading your shoulder blades whilst chatting about their holidays is the very opposite of relaxing.

The other woman now places something like the end of a stethoscope onto Ruth’s stomach, pressing quite hard. Ruth has been told not to go to the loo before the scan and the pressure is really very uncomfortable. For a second she feels like jumping off the bed and heading for the nearest Ladies. But then she sees that the screen is full of what look like wispy grey clouds. In the centre of the clouds something is moving.

Ruth has seen scans before – of bones and other archaeological objects. She knows that the high-frequency sound waves bounce off solid objects. She knows how to look at degrees of light and shade, to assess density and structure. But this – this is something quite different. This collection of dark circles, moving slowly on the screen, this is both completely incomprehensible and suddenly utterly real. This is her baby.

‘That’s the baby’s heart,’ says the woman, speaking for the first time and pushing the gum into the corner of her mouth. She points towards four black, pulsating circles.

‘That’s its spine.’ Ruth sees a slender white line moving across the screen. For some inexplicable reason, tears come to her eyes. Then she remembers something.

‘Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?’

‘Not at this scan. We’ll probably be able to tell at the next one, at about twenty weeks.’

But looking at the screen through swimming eyes, Ruth is convinced that the baby is a boy. There is something masculine, almost jaunty, about the little figure swimming around in her womb. The woman points at another part of the screen. ‘Long legs. Has your partner got long legs?’

Has Nelson got long legs? Ruth imagines him striding from place to place, impatient, eager to get to the next job. He is tall, presumably his legs are long. Longer than Ruth’s, certainly. Then, suddenly, it hits her for the first time. This baby is half his. Up until this point, she has thought of the baby as entirely hers, has even thought that it is the only thing in the world that is really hers. But it is not hers. For a second she sees the shape on the screen as completely alien – a male, a miniature Nelson. She closes her eyes.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes… just a little sick.’

‘That’s OK. It often happens. We’re done anyhow.’ She hands Ruth some scratchy paper towels to clean her stomach and Ruth sits up slowly.

‘I’ll print off an image for you to take home.’

‘An image?’ Ruth looks at her blankly.

‘Of the baby! To show your partner.’

‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’

Ruth drives slowly back to the university, aware that she is doing the whole mirror/signal/manoeuvre thing with more care than at any time since her driving test. She keeps to the two-second rule and is so slow passing a bicycle that the car behind her hoots impatiently. She knows that she is driving like an old lady in a hat but she can’t help herself. She is filled with the overwhelming realisation that she is carrying another human being inside her. A human being, moreover, with its own personality and its father’s long legs. She is its vehicle, carrying it smoothly from A to B, making sure that she gives all the right signals and doesn’t crash into an oncoming lorry. How will she keep it up, a journey of nine months, never exceeding the speed limit, no Little Chef to stop at on the way? Perhaps she’ll get used to it in time…

Term is over for the students. She sees them everywhere: carrying cases into cars, having tearful farewells in doorways, writing loving messages on each other’s T-shirts. Get over it, Ruth wants to say. You’ll see each other again in September. But she can remember what it’s like to have the whole summer stretching ahead of you: working, travelling, lounging around annoying your parents. Four months is an eternity when you’re eighteen. By the time the students come back, Ruth will be seven months pregnant. According to the printout in her bag, her baby is due on the first of November.

The students may be on holiday but Ruth isn’t. She has dissertations to mark and lectures for next year to prepare. She climbs the stairs to her office and is touched to find two of her students loitering outside to say goodbye. Ruth teaches postgraduates who are usually on a one-year MA course so this really is the last time she will see them, especially as these two are from the States (she has a lot of overseas students; the university needs the money).

‘Goodbye… good luck… keep in touch… come and see us if you’re ever in Wisconsin…’

Extracting herself, Ruth opens her door and begins collecting papers and books. Seeing her office with its Indiana Jones poster, its piles of books and examination scripts, gives her a genuine glow of pleasure. At least here she’s Dr Ruth Galloway, Archaeologist, not Ms Ruth Galloway expectant mother (elderly expectant mother, she’d been horrified to see on her notes). She is an academic, a professional, a person in her own right. She’ll spend a few restful few days at home, reading about bones, decomposition and death.

‘Ruth! How are you?’ It is Phil.

Phil now knows about her pregnancy and is being supportive. He expresses this by talking in a hushed voice and asking her how she is at every opportunity.

‘How was it?’ He means the scan (she had to tell him as attending meant she missed the end-of-term lunch) but Ruth chooses to misunderstand.

‘The post-mortem? OK. The new pathologist is a bit over-keen, jumps to conclusions too much–’

‘I meant… the hospital.’

‘Oh, fine thanks.’

‘No problems?’

‘No.’

Phil stands in the doorway, smiling annoyingly. Ruth longs to get rid of him.

‘Going away this summer?’ asks Phil.

‘No. You?’

‘Well…’ Phil looks embarrassed. ‘Sue and I might get away to our place in France for a few days.’ Ruth wonders what Shona thinks about this. The latest from Shona is that Phil will leave his wife ‘after the final examiners’ meeting’. Why this fairly arbitrary date was chosen, Ruth has no idea; she only knows that Shona clings to it like the promise of the second coming. And if Phil does leave Sue, she thinks cynically, Shona’s problems are only just beginning.

‘Are you planning to drop in on the Swaffham site today?’ asks Phil, changing the subject with alacrity. ‘I hear they’re coming up with some interesting stuff.’

‘I might do.’ In fact, she is planning to go straight home. Her back aches and she longs to lie down. But Phil is enthusiastic about Max’s dig. The Romans are always worth a lottery grant or two, maybe even a TV appearance.

‘Great. Could you pick up some soil samples?’

Damn, now she will have to make the detour into Swaffham and spend ages faffing about with sample bags. Why can’t Phil do it? Probably off to meet Shona.

‘OK,’ she says.

It is almost dark by the time she reaches the site. There are no cars parked on the churned-up earth at the bottom of the bank and Ruth is not sure if she feels pleased or disappointed. She hasn’t seen Max since the Imbolc night and wonders whether it will be awkward when she does. Did the kiss mean anything to him? Probably not, probably in Brighton they kiss each other at every opportunity. But she knows she has been thinking about it. Not all the time, she has too many other things on her plate, but certainly more than is comfortable. All in all, she is pleased to have the place to herself.

Getting a torch from her car, she climbs the slope to the site. Clearly the students have been working hard. Three new trenches have been dug and small piles of stones indicate that new buildings have been discovered. It looks as if there really was a small settlement here or, at the very least, a villa and surrounding buildings. Intrigued, Ruth moves closer.

She realises that she is in the very trench that Max first showed her but now it has been extended to expose a corner of a wall, plus what look like the remains of under-floor heating. This must mean that this was an important house. She also sees a corner of mosaic. She spares a thought for the people who settled here, on this exposed hillside, two thousand years ago. Were they Romano-British or Romans in exile? No wonder they had wanted heating, thinks Ruth, shivering in the evening air.

She is about to leave when, out of habit, she runs her torch along the foundation level of bricks, looking for anything strange or unusual. And then she sees it. Tiny reddish brown writing, less than an inch high. At first she can’t make it out, though the letters look very familiar. Then she realises that the words are written upside down. Craning her head round, she reads: ‘Ruth Galloway’.

Afterwards she is not sure quite why this spooked her so much. In a funny way it was the very size of the words, as if some tiny, evil creature has crept in amongst the stone and rubble and written her name. Why? She has only the most tenuous link to this site. Why would anyone go to the trouble of writing her name, upside down, in letters so small they can hardly be seen, on the wall of some obscure archaeological site? She doesn’t know but she knows she isn’t about to hang around and meet the poison dwarf in person. She stands up, heart hammering.

As she does so, she has the strongest sensation that someone is watching her. She swings round, the torch making a wide, panicked arc around her. ‘Who’s there?’

No answer but footsteps, definite footsteps, coming towards her, walking over the gravel in one of the trenches. Ruth scrambles out of her trench and shines her torch out into the darkness. Now she hears another noise. A slow, steady panting. Someone is breathing, very near her.

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.

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 dentist 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.