The Janus Stone

CHAPTER 21

Ruth is at Woolmarket Street. The builders are starting work again tomorrow and she wants to collect the rest of the finds. Not that the other trenches have turned up anything very exciting – some more pottery, some glass, a few coins. But there might be something interesting there and she needs to check that the site is tidy. That’s her job as lead archaeologist. It’s another warm day and it’s surprising how innocuous the site looks in the sunlight. Nevertheless, Ruth finds herself looking over her shoulder every few minutes and jumping when a squirrel runs across the wall in front of her.

Although she still has a plaster stuck rather rakishly over one eye, Ruth feels remarkably well after Saturday’s trauma. The boy doctor had told her not to be alone in the night, ‘in case you fall into a coma’ he explained cheerfully, but Ruth had been so exhausted that she went to bed at nine and slept beautifully with only Flint for company. She’s sure that it was the conversation with Nelson that caused her to sleep so peacefully. He knows. He may be agonised and conflicted and all the rest of it, he may now drive her mad by interfering at every stage in the pregnancy, but at least he knows. She is no longer entirely on her own. And this morning she had a civil, if stilted, conversation with her mother. Ruth didn’t mention any of the events of the last few weeks but assured her mother that she was no longer feeling sick, had more energy, was not doing so much awful digging. ‘I sailed through both my pregnancies,’ said her mother smugly and Ruth is only too happy to allow her this victory.

The site is still deserted. Ruth had half expected to see Irish Ted and Trace. There is still some work to do back-filling trenches, though maybe they have decided not to bother in view of the fact that the house is shortly to be razed to the ground. Ruth collects the finds from the foreman’s hut. No sign of him either, thank goodness. She looks across at the arch silhouetted against the blue sky. Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. She must remember to ask Nelson to check when the arch was built. It seems a strange, grandiose thing to find in a private house. Ruth is reminded of Roman generals being granted triumphal arches when they achieved great victories. She thinks of a trip she and Shona took to Rome a few years ago. The arch of Titus in the Roman forum, decorated with reliefs illustrating Titus’s victory against the rebellious Jews. She remembers reading that it is meant to be impossible for a Jew to pass through the arch. ‘I can do it,’ Shona had exclaimed, running laughing underneath. ‘You’re not Jewish,’ Ruth had objected. But Shona had been in the midst of an affair with a Jewish law lecturer and considered that this counted.

She should have another look at the trench where the cat was found but something makes her wary about going into the grounds, so far away from the main road. There is something heavy, something watchful, about the silence. Don’t be silly, she tells herself, it’s broad daylight. What can possibly hurt you? She shoulders her backpack and picks her way through the rubble, past the outhouses and into what was once the back garden. Was this ever the happy place that Kevin Davies remembers? Ruth tries to imagine children running laughing through the garden, swinging on the tree, throwing pennies in the wishing well. No, the well was covered up by then. She approaches the well now and looks inside. A dank, unpleasant smell meets her and she straightens up hastily. When was the well covered? That’s another question for Nelson. The skulls must have been put in the well before the concrete cap was put in place. Skulls in a well. The words have a crazy, topsy-turvy sound, like a nightmare nursery rhyme. She thinks of the children on the beach. Ding Dong Dell.

The cat’s trench is by the outer wall, bulging now with age. This is the boundary. Terminus, the God of boundaries. ‘I pray to him whenever I go to Heathrow,’ Nelson had said when he heard the name. She can’t imagine Nelson on holiday somehow. She is sure that Michelle insists on somewhere sun-kissed and glamorous whereas Nelson is more suited to wilder, colder places – the Yorkshire moors, perhaps, or the Scottish Highlands. She can just picture him up to his waist in some freezing loch.

Ruth stands up, easing her back. It is really hot now and the air is still. She climbs out of the trench and walks along by the outer wall. The new buildings are obviously going to come up right to the edge of the boundary. So much for spacious apartments. The modern walls look brash and confident against the crumbling flint of the originals. There are still some apple trees here though, and, in the far corner of the site, Ruth finds gooseberry and redcurrant bushes choked with thistles and dusty with builder’s dirt. Blackberries too, the brambles reaching out like tiny, spiteful fingers. The flowers haven’t set yet and, by the time they are berries, these bushes will have been ripped out to make room for ‘spacious landscaped gardens with water features’.

‘Blackberry and apple pie,’ says a voice, ‘now there’s a dish fit for a king.’

Ruth wheels round. An elderly man in a dark suit is standing smiling at her. He has an unripe apple in his hand and, for one mad moment, Ruth thinks of Adam in the Garden of Eden. An older, sadder Adam come to mourn the devastation of paradise. Then she sees the clerical collar and her brain clicks into gear.

‘Father Hennessey?’

‘Yes.’ The man holds out his hand. ‘You have the advantage of me, I’m afraid.’

‘Ruth Galloway. I’m an archaeologist.’

‘An archaeologist?’

‘I specialise in forensics.’

‘Ah,’ says Hennessey, understanding. ‘You’re involved in this sorry affair then.’

‘Yes.’

Father Hennessey sighs. From Nelson’s description, Ruth imagined that he would be a more aggressive presence, like one of the fire and brimstone preachers she remembers from her childhood. This man just looks sad.

‘The building work’s more advanced than I thought it would be,’ he says. ‘How on earth have they managed to cram so much onto one site?’

‘By making everything extremely small,’ says Ruth drily. ‘The whole of one of these flats could probably fit into the drawing room of the original house.’

‘You’re right there,’ says Hennessey, ‘this was a grand house once.’

They walk back through the garden. Hennessey stops once to look at a fallen tree, patting its stump sadly. It is hotter than ever. Thunder weather, Ruth thinks. Her shirt is sticking to her back and her feet seem to have melted and are spilling over the sides of her shoes. She longs to be lying down.

When they reach the front of the house, Hennessey looks up at the stone archway.

‘Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. Everything changes, nothing is destroyed.’

‘The arch was there in your time then?’

‘Yes. It’s a folly, of course, but a rather magnificent one. And I always thought the words quite appropriate. After all, if you’re a Christian, you believe that death itself is just a change, not destruction.’

Ruth says nothing. Death is death as far as she is concerned. There is no way of cheating death except, perhaps, by having a child. But Hennessey’s words remind her of something. Max, on the beach with the Imbolc bonfire behind him, talking about Janus. ‘He’s not just the god of doorways but of any time of transition and change, of progression from one condition to another.’ The ultimate transition, from life to death.

‘Miss Galloway,’ Hennessey’s soft Irish voice cuts into her thoughts, ‘I wonder if you can show me… where you found the body.’

‘All right. And it’s Ruth.’ She hates to be called ‘Miss’ and Dr Galloway seems too formal somehow.

Part of the front wall still stands, the steps and the stone portico. Was this from the same period as the arch? It has a similar grandiose feel. A folly, the priest had said. The words reverberate uneasily in Ruth’s head.

‘Careful here,’ she says as they go through the doorway. On the other side, the ledge of black and white tiles is still there. It will be the last thing to go, thinks Ruth. The last link to the old house.

‘This way.’ She leads Hennessey along the ledge. As they climb down into the trench, he stumbles and almost falls.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine.’ But he is breathing heavily. He must be in his late seventies or even eighties, Ruth thinks.

Ruth points to the pile of earth in front of her. ‘The body was buried directly under the doorstep. We’ve removed that. We tried to leave everything else undisturbed.’ She looks at Hennessey’s face. ‘We’re very careful,’ she finds herself explaining, ‘very respectful.’

Hennessey’s lips move silently for a second. Is he praying? Then he says, ‘Buried under the doorstep, you say?’

‘Yes.’ She doesn’t mention the foetal position.

‘And the skull was in the well?’

‘That’s right.’

Hennessey is silent for a few minutes and then he says, ‘Would you mind if I said a prayer?’

‘Go ahead.’ Ruth backs away. She finds public prayer embarrassing at the best of times but to be trapped in a trench with someone chanting in Latin and waving incense – it’s her worst nightmare.

However Hennessey’s prayer turns out to be mercifully short, the words muttered and not (as far as Ruth can tell) in Latin. At the end he takes a small bottle from his pocket and sprinkles water onto the earth.

‘Holy water,’ he explains. He looks at Ruth’s face. ‘You’re not a Catholic?’ He sounds amused.

‘No. My parents are Christians but I’m not… anything.’

‘Oh, you’re something, Ruth Galloway,’ says Father Hennessey. He looks at her for a second and Ruth has the strangest feeling that he knows her very well, almost better than she knows herself. But then the moment passes and Hennessey says briskly, ‘I’m parched. Do you fancy a cup of coffee?’

Nelson is leaving the museum when he gets a call from Judy.

‘I’ve got Annabelle Spens’ death certificate, boss.’

‘Good. Anything interesting?’

He hears her rustling paper and he thinks of his father’s death certificate, those few stilted words encompassing all the pain and grief. His father’s cause of death had been ‘myocardial infarction’. At the time he had no idea what that meant.

‘Date and place of death,’ reads Judy. ‘24 May 1952, Woolmarket House, Woolmarket Street, Norwich. Cause of death: Scarlet fever. Children don’t get that any more do they?’

‘They get it,’ says Nelson, ‘they just don’t die of it.’ He stops as a party of schoolchildren stream past him, holding photocopied worksheets and trying to trip each other up.

‘She died at home,’ Judy is saying. ‘How come she wasn’t in hospital?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was more usual to nurse children at home in those days.’

‘But they had money, they could afford health care. This was before the NHS, wasn’t it?’

‘Early days of the NHS.’

The children push through the glass doors of the museum. He can hear their teacher telling them that they’re going to be divided into groups. ‘You’re in my group, Ryan.’ That’s your day ruined, Ryan, you poor sod.

‘What about the certificate of interment?’ he asks.

‘Tanya’s getting it,’ says Judy, sounding slightly pissed off. ‘Boss, do you really think that Annabelle was buried in the house and not in a grave?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Nelson. ‘But there’s something odd about that house. There’s something odd about this whole case.’

He had been to see the curator, to ask how the foetus model could have escaped from the museum and ended up at Ruth’s feet in the trench in Swaffham. The curator had been perfectly pleasant but unable to offer any answers. The stages of development model had been taken down from display a few weeks ago (they had had some complaints from parents) and the components placed in the store room. Who had access? Well, any of the museum staff. The more valuable exhibits were kept in a safe but who would steal a plastic model of a baby? Who indeed?

Nelson stands on the steps, looking about over the Norwich rooftops and wondering what his next move should be. Should he go back and question Edward Spens again? He is sure that the man is holding something back. Should he get back to the station and bully Tanya about the interment certificate? They need to get hold of the dental records too. He sighs. It’s a hot, muggy day and more than anything else he fancies diving into a pub for a cold beer. That’s what Clough would do, he’s sure of it.

‘Hi, Detective Chief Inspector.’

Nelson whirls round. A young woman with lurid purple hair is smiling cheekily up at him. Who is she? One of his daughters’ friends? A trendy acquaintance of Michelle’s?

‘I’m Trace,’ says the apparition. ‘From the dig.’

Oh yes. The skinny girl who was on the site the first day. The one they all think Cloughie fancies. Rather him than me, thinks Nelson, looking at the metalwork gleaming on Trace’s ears and lip. But she seems friendly enough.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.

‘Routine enquiries,’ he answers. ‘What about you?’

‘I work here, Mondays and Fridays. There’s not enough field archaeology to keep me busy all year round so I do some curatorial work, processing finds and that.’

Nelson has no idea what ‘processing finds’ means but he knows one thing: Trace could be an important contact within the museum. She might well know if anyone has been waltzing off with the exhibits. ‘Fancy a drink?’ he says.

Ruth tries to steer towards one of the picturesque cafés around Woolmarket Street but Father Patrick Hennessey heads like a bloodhound towards the shopping centre and Starbucks, a place Ruth loathes. ‘You can get a grand coffee in here,’ says Hennessey, rubbing his hands together. The air-conditioning is so strong that Ruth is shivering.

She notices some odd glances as they enter the café – the overweight woman with mud-stained trousers and a plaster over one eye, and the priest, red-faced in his black clothes. Ruth orders mineral water but Hennessey goes for the full skinny-latte-with-an-extra-shot-of-espresso palaver.

‘It’s impossible to get a decent coffee where I live,’ he explains.

‘Where do you live?’

‘In a godforsaken corner of the Sussex countryside.’ He says ‘godforsaken’ like he really means it.

‘Nelson, DCI Nelson, said it was very pretty.’

‘It’s pretty enough if you like trees. No, I’m a city boy. Born and brought up in Dublin. I’ve always lived in towns – Rome, London, Norwich.’

It sounds a bit like Del Boy’s van – New York, Paris, Peckham. Ruth suppresses a smile. ‘Norwich isn’t exactly cosmopolitan.’

‘Sure and it’s a fine town. I miss it. I miss my work, my parishioners, everything.’

‘You ran the children’s home, didn’t you?’

‘I started it and ran it, yes. I’d seen an orphanage in the East End of London, a place where the children lived together almost like a family. I tried to create something similar. Recruited all the staff myself. I chose young religious people, people who still had some ideals left.’

‘I met one of your ex… residents. He remembered the place with great affection.’

Hennessey looks interested. ‘Who did you meet?’

‘Davies, I think his name was.’

‘Oh, Kevin Davies. He was a nice boy. He’s an undertaker now I believe. He always had a serious way about him.’

Ruth thinks of the worried, crumpled-looking Davies. She can’t imagine him as a child. She is sure that he always looked forty.

Hennessey is looking at her. He has very blue eyes, with white smile-lines etched against his weather-beaten face.

‘Must be a difficult job,’ he says, ‘uncovering the past.’

Ruth is struck by this description. Most people see archaeology as ‘digging up bones’ but ‘uncovering the past’ is really what it is. She looks at the priest with new respect.

‘It is hard,’ she says carefully, ‘especially in cases like this where you’re dealing with the fairly recent past and especially when there’s a child involved.’ She stops, feeling that she has said too much.

But Hennessey is nodding. ‘As a priest I’ve often come across things that are best kept hidden. But the truth has a way of coming to the surface.’

Like the bones under the doorway, thinks Ruth. If Spens hadn’t been so keen to develop the site, if Ted and Trace hadn’t dug in that exact spot, would they have remained hidden for ever? Or would the long-forgotten crime have risen to the surface, crying out for vengeance?

‘Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t,’ she says.

‘Pontius Pilate would agree with you. “Truth” he said,

“what is that?” And he was a wise man, Pilate. A coward but a wise man.’

Ruth is slightly confused by the way he is talking about Pontius Pilate as if he might, at any moment, walk into Starbucks. ‘DCI Nelson will find the truth,’ she says, with more confidence than she feels, ‘if anyone can.’

‘Ah, DCI Nelson. He’s a fine man, I think. A man with morals.’ Ruth is furious to find herself blushing. ‘He’s a good detective,’ she says.

‘And a good man,’ says Hennessey softly, ‘which may prove more difficult for him.’

Rather reluctantly, Nelson settles for a coke but Trace asks for a pint of bitter.

‘I thought all archaeologists drank cider,’ says Nelson.

Trace pulls a face. ‘Cider’s for wimps.’

I could get to like this girl, thinks Nelson.

‘How long have you been an archaeologist?’ he asks.

‘I left uni five years ago. I did an MA in London and worked in Australia for a bit. I didn’t really want to come back to Norwich but my mum and dad live here and it’s cheaper to live with them. There’s lots of archaeology here too.’

‘Lots of prehistoric stuff,’ says Nelson. He knows this from Ruth.

Trace nods. ‘Bronze Age and Iron Age. And Roman. That’s my favourite period. The Romans.’

‘Did you see Gladiator? Great film.’

Trace snorts. ‘Films get everything wrong. All that decadent stuff, lying about eating grapes. The Romans brought law and order and infrastructure. We were nothing but a band of disparate warring tribes until they came along.’

Identifying ‘we’ as the British, Nelson says, slightly aggrieved, ‘They were invaders, occupiers, weren’t they?’

‘They were here for four hundred years. That’s more than fifteen generations. And, when they left, we forgot everything they taught us – all the stone building and engineering works, glass-making, pottery. We slipped into the Dark Ages.’

Nelson feels rather proud of this. They may have been here four hundred years, he thinks, but to us they were still foreigners, occupiers, with their fancy, glass-making ways. He does not say this to Trace though.

‘Have you been to the site in Swaffham?’ he asks. ‘Max Grey’s site?’

Trace’s face lights up. ‘Yes. I’ve done quite a bit of work there. He’s great, Max. He really knows his stuff. He did this great tour the other week for the Scouts. Made it all come alive.’

‘Do you get lots of visitors on the site?’

Trace shrugs. ‘A few. It’s become quite well-known since they mentioned it on Time Team. We’ve had some coach parties.’

‘Has Edward Spens paid a visit?’

Trace’s face, so open and animated when talking about the superiority of the Romans, becomes closed again. ‘I think he came once. I wasn’t there though.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘Everyone in Norwich knows him.’

‘The Spens family,’ Nelson tells his team, ‘have lived in Norwich for generations. Walter Spens built the house on Woolmarket Road. He was, by all accounts, rather an eccentric. Had a collection of stuffed animals and liked to dress as an African chieftain.’

Clough, scoffing peanuts at the back of the room, coughs and almost chokes. Nelson glares at him.

‘His grandson, Christopher Spens, was headmaster of St Saviours, the public school that used to be on the Waterloo Road. According to his son, Roderick Spens, he was a bit of a tartar, made his children call him sir and forced them to speak in Latin at mealtimes.’

Nelson stops. Sir Roderick had not described his father as a tartar, in fact he had sounded almost admiring, but Nelson had the strong impression of a cold, controlling man. He wonders if he is betraying his own prejudice against public schools, Latin and posh people in general.

Nelson looks at his team. Clough is still spitting out peanut crumbs. Tanya Fuller has her notebook open. Judy Johnson has her eyes fixed on Nelson’s face, frowning slightly.

‘Sir Roderick Spens is in the first stages of senile dementia,’ continues Nelson, ‘so his impressions are rather confused. He remembers his father very clearly but it upsets him to talk about his sister. According to the death certificate Annabelle Spens died of scarlet fever aged six. She died at home and is buried in the churchyard at St Peter and St Paul.’

He looks at the team, wondering if they realise the implications of this. Judy does, obviously, but Clough can sometimes be a bit slow on the uptake. Sure enough, it is Tanya who speaks, ‘Could it be Annabelle who was buried under the door?’

‘I don’t know but I think we have to consider the possibility.’

‘But they buried her.’ This is Clough, sounding almost aggrieved.

‘Yes but it might have been fairly easy, if they had the coffin at home on the night before the funeral, to remove the body and then screw the lid on again.’

‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Nelson impatiently, ‘but I intend to find out.’

‘Dental records?’ asks Tanya.

‘Yes. You can get on to that, Tanya. The skull we found in the well had a filling in one of the teeth. That’s unusual in such a young child. Should be fairly easy to match. I’m also going to find out if there’s a DNA link between the dead child and Sir Roderick.’

‘What if there aren’t any dental records?’ asks Judy.

‘Then I’ll dig up the grave,’ says Nelson grimly.