The Janus Stone Read online

  Has Nelson noticed anything? She doesn’t think so. He was fairly abrupt but that is what Nelson is like when he is on an investigation. And he had deferred to her, asked her how long the excavations would take, much to the annoyance of Trace and the foreman. She wishes she hadn’t been sick though. Irish Ted had been nice but she doesn’t trust Trace not to tell all her field archaeology friends. Had it been the car journey and the exertion of clambering over the site? Or had it been the skeleton, the foetal position, the thought of the head separated from the body? She remembers Max’s talk of head rituals in Celtic mythology. Celts were head hunters. Celtic warriors would cut off their opponents’ heads in battle and hang them from their horses’ necks. After battle, the heads would be displayed at the entrance to the temple. The severed head is a recurring theme in Celtic art.

  Is the building-site body Celtic or Roman? Is it medieval, a relic from the long vanished churchyard? Maybe, but Ruth is still convinced that it was buried fairly recently, in the last couple of hundred years. The disturbance of the earth under the door suggests that it was buried when the door was put in place. How old was the children’s home? She will have to ask Nelson to look at the title deeds and planning history.

  She is passing the Swaffham road and, on impulse, makes a sharp turn, earning her a furious hoot from the car behind. She will stop off at the Roman dig, have a word with Max. If nothing else it will be good to be out in the open air after a day spent in the car. The earlier rain has stopped; the air will be sharp and pure at the top of the hill.

  To her surprise she finds a coach parked awkwardly at the foot of the grass bank. The driver is still inside, eating a sandwich and reading the Sun. As Ruth parks her Renault beside the bus, she notices a group of elderly people approaching. They are dressed in tweeds and waterproofs and some are carrying guidebooks. The slope is steep and some of them are leaning on sticks and breathing heavily, while others sprint along like teenagers. Ruth spots Max bringing up the rear, offering his arm to a large grey-haired woman. Some of the elderly people smile and wave at Ruth and she waves back, although she has no idea who they are. They seem friendly anyway. When everyone is inside the bus, the driver puts down his paper and the wheels churn slowly in the mud. Max waves heartily until they are out of sight.

  ‘Hi!’

  Max jumps. ‘Ruth. I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘Who were the visitors?’

  He grimaces. ‘The Conservative Association.’ Ruth starts to regret waving. ‘We’ve had quite a few groups now. It was the Scouts earlier.’

  ‘Jesus. Two paramilitary organisations in one day.’

  Max grins. It’s the oldies who scare me most. Did you see that woman walking with me? Looked just like the Emperor Vespasian.’

  Ruth laughs. ‘I just came to have a look round but if you’ve had enough for today…’

  ‘No, no.’ Ruth is flattered by Max’s eager denial. ‘I’d love to show you round. We found something interesting today actually.’

  They climb the hill, Ruth trying to disguise how out of breath she is. Jesus, at this rate she’ll be immobile at nine months. The trouble was, she wasn’t terribly fit before.

  At the top of the hill, Max bounds off towards the furthest trench. Ruth follows more slowly. She can see that, even before his students arrive, Max has been busy. There are now three trenches radiating outwards like spokes on a wheel. The furthest trench is the deepest, and as she gets closer she can see the layers, topsoil then the telltale layer of chalk which indicates that once, thousands of years ago, this whole area was under water. Cut into the chalk line she sees a wall, the mix of flint and mortar with a thin line of bricks distinctly Roman. And, below the bricks, a silver-grey orb, faintly translucent in the evening light.

  ‘A skull?’

  ‘Yes. Can’t see any more just yet.’

  ‘Do you think it could be a foundation sacrifice?’

  ‘Yes I do.’ Max gestures towards the bricks. ‘I think this may have been the corner of a room, which could be significant. Remember the bodies at Springfield? They were buried in all four corners of the temple.’

  ‘Is this a temple then?’ Ruth looks round at the trench, with its neat earth walls open to the sky; her archaeologist’s eye seeing instead a stone temple with statues, altar and incense burning.

  ‘Again, it’s possible. We’ve found some pottery. They could be amphorae. But it could also be a private house.’

  Ruth knows that all Roman houses would have had shrines to the domestic gods. The head of the house – the paterfamilias – would have been, to all intents and purposes, the high priest of his own household religion. And at the hearth, the symbolic centre of the home, there would have been a fire sacred to the goddess of fire. What was she called?

  ‘Vesta,’ supplies Max. ‘Just think of the matches. Her Greek name was Hestia. The women of the house would be responsible for making sure the fire didn’t go out and for making offerings to her.’

  ‘Haven’t there been instances of bodies being found buried inside Roman houses?’ asks Ruth.

  ‘In early Roman times it was quite usual for a dead family member to be buried inside the house,’ says Max. ‘We often find the letters DM by these tombs. Dii Manes – the spirits of the dead or The Good.’

  Ruth shivers, thinking of the little body buried under the door in Woolmarket Street. The Good. Children are good, by anybody’s reckoning, and innocent. But this does not seem to stop people from doing dreadful things to them.

  ‘Children’s bodies have been found too, haven’t they?’ she says.

  ‘Yes. In Cambridge in the seventies twelve newborn babies were found buried under a Roman building. We don’t know if they had died naturally, maybe even stillborn, or if they were sacrifices.’

  ‘The field team have found a body on a building site in Norwich,’ says Ruth slowly. ‘I think it’s headless.’

  Max looks at her with interest. ‘Modern?’

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t done carbon dating yet. But the grave cut looks fairly recent.’

  ‘The bones could still be old though.’

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Ruth. ‘But the skeleton looks intact. I think it was buried when the doorway was built.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Well, the house is Victorian but the entrance and portico could be later, I suppose. It used to be a children’s home.’

  Thinking of the children’s home reminds her of something else. She gets her notebook out of her pocket. ‘Do you know what this means?’ she asks. ‘It was an inscription found at the site.’

  Max looks down at the words and, for a second, his face seems to darken. Ruth wonders if she has offended him. ‘I couldn’t understand it myself,’ she says, rather nervously. ‘I didn’t go to the right kind of school.’

  ‘Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit,’ says Max slowly, ‘It means: everything changes, nothing perishes.’

  ‘Oh… thanks. Did you learn Latin at school then?’ He has a rather public-school look to him, Ruth thinks. Maybe it’s the curly hair. Or the Range Rover.

  Max smiles, his laid-back charming self again. ‘No, but I’ve learnt a good deal of Latin over the years. The Romans are my speciality after all.’

  ‘Everything changes, nothing perishes,’ repeats Ruth. ‘What sort of a motto is that?’

  ‘The perfect motto for an archaeologist,’ says Max, clambering out of the trench.

  *

  Nelson drives back to the police station, trying to ignore Clough who is noisily eating a packet of crisps. When out on a case Clough eats almost constantly: crisps, sweets, innumerable takeaways. It’s a wonder he’s not the size of a house, thinks Nelson sourly. In fact, Clough has less of a gut than he has. There’s no justice.

  ‘Do you think it’s a murder?’ asks Clough, crunching away. The smell of cheese and onion is making Nelson feel sick. Perhaps I’ve got morning sickness, he thinks. He suffered psychosomatic pains with both Michelle’s pregnancies. But Ru
th may not be pregnant and, even if she is, the child might not be his.

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ he says shortly. ‘And you had no business speculating.’

  ‘Come on, boss, you know what those nuns and priests are like. I read a book once, set in Ireland, and the things they did to those poor kids.’

  Nelson is silent, thinking of his own schooling in Catholic establishments. The brothers had been strict, he remembers, strict but fair. And he’d been no angel at school, probably deserved everything he got. He remembers the parish priest, Father Damian, a slight, insignificant man, worshipped by Nelson’s mother who was forever ascribing dogmatic opinions to him. ‘Father Damian thinks, Father Damian says…’ He couldn’t remember Father Damian himself ever offering an opinion about anything, except about the horses. He’d been a betting man he remembers.

  ‘Lots of those books are bollocks,’ he says, taking a corner too fast. ‘Authors make everything up just to make money.’

  ‘Nuns are creepy, though,’ says Clough, unabashed. ‘Those black robes, those headdresses. Spooky.’

  ‘My aunt’s a nun,’ says Nelson, to shut him up. In fact, Sister Margaret Mary of the Precious Blood is his great-aunt, his grandmother’s sister. He hasn’t seen her for years.

  ‘You’re joking! You a Catholic then?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson, though he hasn’t been to church since Rebecca’s first holy communion, eight years ago.

  ‘Bloody hell, boss. I wouldn’t have had you down as religious.’

  ‘I’m not,’ says Nelson. ‘You don’t have to be religious to be a Catholic.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Ruth and Max are in the bar of the Phoenix. Ruth is ragingly hungry once again. She has torn open a packet of crisps (plain) and is having to force herself even to put up a pretence of sharing them with Max.

  ‘No thanks.’ Max waves the crisps away and takes a gulp of beer. In celebration, Ruth puts four into her mouth.

  ‘I’d like you to have another look at the bones when we’ve excavated them,’ says Max. ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Ruth, blushing and crunching.

  ‘After all, that’s your area of expertise isn’t it?’

  Ruth agrees that it is, trying to sound like an expert and less like a contestant in a crisp-eating challenge.

  ‘I’d like to know how and why the body was decapitated,’ says Max. ‘Whether it was before or after death.’

  ‘Do you think it could be evidence of a head cult?’ asks Ruth.

  ‘It’s possible. Head cults are more Celtic than Roman but there have been Roman examples. Of course, heads were often preserved as holy relics in medieval times. Think of St Hugh of Lincoln. They cut off his head so it could perform miracles on its own. St Fremund too. There’s a legend that he was seen washing his severed head in a well. Of course, afterwards the well had miraculous powers.’

  Max’s voice is interested, even amused, but Ruth has little time for miracles. Her parents, of course, despise anything to do with relics and shrines, seeing them as sinister papist practices. Ruth thinks of the children’s home and of Nelson’s defensiveness about the nuns. He was brought up a Catholic, she knows. She thinks of Cathbad, her friend and sometime Druid. He’d love all this.

  ‘They think there was a medieval church on my Norwich site,’ she says. ‘That’s why the field team was there in the first place.’

  ‘You know what Norwich is like,’ says Max, still sounding amused. ‘There are churches everywhere.’

  ‘A church for every week of the year…’

  ‘And a pub for every day,’ concludes Max. They both laugh. For some reason Ruth feels relieved, as if they have somehow moved away from dangerous ground. Max’s eyes meet hers and she feels herself blushing. Then the moment is ruined as her stomach gives a thunderous rumble.

  ‘Would you like something to eat?’ says Max. ‘The food here’s pretty good.’

  Ruth assents eagerly.

  It is pitch black by the time she gets back to the Saltmarsh. She drives slowly; the road has ditches on either side and one false turn of the wheel could send her plunging into the darkness. Nothingness. The flat marsh land has disappeared into the night, her headlights the only light for miles. Has the rest of the world ceased to exist? It feels like that sometimes. She drives on in her circle of light, Radio 4 muttering soothingly in her ear.

  Her cottage is dark but, as she starts down the path, her untidy garden is suddenly flooded with harsh, white light. Nelson insisted on fitting this security light after the Lucy Downey case. Ruth hates it. She is always being woken up because a fox has wandered across her garden and is caught in the spotlight. She doesn’t mind the dark but the light can be terrifying.

  Thank goodness Flint comes hurrying to meet her, purring loudly. Since the death of her other cat, Sparky, Ruth becomes morbidly worried if she doesn’t see Flint as soon as she comes home. What will he do when he has to share my attention with a baby, thinks Ruth, spooning out cat food. But the idea of a baby in the cottage is still unimaginable. Intellectually, she knows she is pregnant and that in six months or so she will have a baby. But she keeps catching herself wondering where she will go on holiday next year and if she might be able to take a sabbatical and go digging in the Virgin Islands. I’ll have a baby by then, she tells herself, but her imagination just can’t cope. Bring pregnant is enough to be going on with; the reality of a baby is, at present, too much for her.

  She’d hoped that telling her parents might make it more real but instead their melodramatic response has made the whole thing seem fantastical. Did her father really say, ‘I’ll kill the scoundrel?’ Surely not. Did her mother really weep and say that her worst fears had been realised? Did she really declare that Ruth had been living an immoral life and this was her reward? Language like this belongs in films and not in real life. Being churchgoers her parents are used to talking about death, destruction and the wages of sin. Ruth is used to scientific facts, soberly presented. presently. She is simply not equipped to cope with the vocabulary.

  She will have to tell Phil soon. She can’t have people guessing at work and she is sure that Trace will tell everyone that she was sick on the site. Phil will be fine, she’s sure. He’s a new man, always boasting about changing nappies and helping with housework. Of course, now he’s having an affair with Ruth’s friend Shona, which doesn’t do his perfect husband and father image much good. But Ruth is not supposed to know about that. She will tell Phil and sort out her maternity leave. Perhaps then she will start to believe that she is really going to have a baby.

  Somehow she is hungry again and she forages in the kitchen for some biscuits. Then she sits at her desk to check her emails, scrolling down through the requests from students for extra time on their assignments, the supposedly amusing jokes sent from a colleague in the chemistry department, the new timetables for next year. Incredible to think that the academic year is almost at an end.

  She is just about to delete another email from the chemistry department when she sees the name of the sender.

  From: Michael Malone

  Date: 19 May 2008 17.30

  To: Ruth Galloway

  Subject: Imbolc

  Michael Malone, also known as Cathbad, sometime Druid, also employed as a lab assistant in the chemistry department. Strange that she had been thinking about Cathbad only that evening, sitting in the pub with Max. But, on second thoughts, maybe not that strange. Cathbad has a habit of appearing just when he is needed. Cathbad would say that this is his sixth sense, his extraordinary sensitivity to the world around him. Ruth prefers to think of it as coincidence. As far as she is concerned, the jury is out on Cathbad’s sixth sense.

  Light a fire to celebrate Imbolc [reads the email], the Gaelic festival of the coming of spring. Join us on Saltmarsh beach on Friday 23rd May at six o’clock. Light a fire for Brigid, the goddess of holy wells, sacred flames and healing.

  Below, in rather less high-flown language, Cathbad
has written:

  Imbolc is traditionally celebrated on 2nd Feb but the weather’s been so bad I thought we’d wait. I don’t expect Brigid will mind! Do come, Ruth.

  He finishes with a Gaelic verse to which he has kindly added a translation.

  Thig an nathair as an toll

  La donn Bride,

  Ged robh tri traighean dh’ an t-sneachd

  Air leachd an lair.

  The serpent will come from the hole

  On the brown Day of Bride,

  Though there should be three feet of snow On the flat surface of the ground.

  Ruth looks at this email for a long time. On one hand it is Cathbad doing what he does best, combining Celtic mysticism with an opportunity for binge drinking and dancing round a fire. On the other hand… She points her cursor at the words ‘goddess of holy wells’. It seems strange, even sinister, that this email should come just after her discussion with Max. Ruth wonders about the term ‘holy wells’. Brigid seems distinctly pagan – in what sense were her wells holy? And what’s this about ‘sacred flames’? Is Brigid another fire goddess? Sacred, holy – it is the language of the Church but she knows that there will be nothing Christian about the celebration on Saltmarsh beach.

  On impulse, she types ‘St Bridget’ into her search engine. Immediately, she comes up with a Wikipedia entry for St Bridget, or Brigid. St Bridget, she reads, is considered one of Ireland’s patron saints, along with Patrick and Columba. Her feast day is the first of February.

  Imbolc, according to Cathbad, is usually held on the second of February. Does the holy Bridget (a nun, she discovers) have anything to do with the earlier, pagan feast day? She reads on. Bridget founded Kildare monastery, which is sometimes called ‘the church of the oak’ after the large oak tree which grew outside Bridget’s cell. The oak, Ruth knows, is highly important in Norse and Celtic mythology. The word Druid even comes from the Celtic word for oak ‘derw’.