The Janus Stone (17 page)

Father Hennessey approaches and, suddenly, his face is filled with such recognition and delight that Ruth is stunned.

Why on earth is he so pleased to see her? Or is it Nelson he is looking at?

But the priest looks straight past Ruth and Nelson. His blue eyes are full of tears.

'Martin,' he says, 'how good to see you again.'

25th June: Ludi Taurii begin

An opportunity presented itself today. The mother had gone out, leaving the child asleep in its bed. It no longer sleeps in a cot but in a bed with bars at the side to stop it falling out. She was worried about leaving the child alone in the house with me but she was in pain from an infected tooth and needed to see the dentist urgently. I assured her smoothly that the child was safe with me, as indeed she will be. As soon as the mother had gone I got my knife and went straight into the room.

She was asleep, her mouth slightly open. She is not an attractive child, whatever the mother says. I turned her over so the neck was exposed. I could see a little pulse there. The perfect place.

To tell you the truth, dear diary, I had slightly been dreading this moment. Would I be struck by Pity, that emasculating emotion? Would I lack the requisite manliness to do the deed? But I am pleased to report that, as I stood above the infant like an avenging angel, I felt no pity at all. Rather a great joy swept over me, a feel of immense power and
righteousness.
Yes, that was it. I knew beyond any doubt that I was doing the
right thing.
My arm felt like steel, strong yet flexible. My eyes burned in my skull. I lifted the knife.

Then—oh banality!—the phone rang. Oh, evil modern influence, obtruding on the ancient rituals! Of course, the moment was ruined and I went to answer the infernal machine. It was Them. We chatted quite civilly but they will be back next week. So little time.

Still very hot. The house waits.

CHAPTER 24

At first Ruth does not understand what is happening. She looks from Hennessey to Max and back again, wondering as she does so why Nelson also looks so shell shocked. And it is Nelson who speaks first.

'Martin,' he says,
'you're
Martin Black?'

Max laughs. A laugh Ruth has never heard before, harsh and slightly wild. 'Black, Grey,' he says, 'what's the difference?'

And then Ruth remembers. Martin and Elizabeth Black. The two children who had lived at the home and had vanished so mysteriously. Can it really be true? Can Max, who claimed to know nothing about the Woolmarket Street site, actually have lived here once? Is this why he has come back to Norfolk? And if he has kept this secret from her, says another, darker, voice in her ear, what else has he been hiding?

Father Hennessey now comes closer to Max, who has turned deadly white. 'Martin,' he says, in a voice choked with emotion, 'I never thought I'd see you again. My dear boy.'

Max reaches out a hand and touches the priest's arm. His eyes, too, are full of tears.

'Father Hennessey,' he says, 'I never forgot you.'

'And Elizabeth?' It is barely a whisper.

'She died.' Max turns his face away.

Nelson's voice is like a rush of cold air. 'I think you need to answer a few questions, Mr Grey. Or is it Mr Black?'

'I've done nothing wrong,' says Max defiantly.

'I'll be the judge of that,' says Nelson. 'Now, if you'd accompany me to the station.'

Max looks as if he is about to refuse but then he gives a little shrug and follows Nelson out through the archway. No wonder he knew what the inscription meant, thinks Ruth.

Father Hennessey hesitates and then, with an apologetic glance at Ruth, he hurries after the other men. Ruth is left on her own amongst the diggers.

Late afternoon and Ruth is at home. For the first few hours after the revelation at the building site she had been certain that either Max or Nelson was about to call at any minute. Surely someone was going to tell her what was going on? But as time passed and she fed Flint, made herself a light lunch (and heavy pudding), tidied the sitting room, put the washing on, answered emails and finally settled down to read a dissertation on 'The Archaeology of Disease', she had to face the fact that no one was going to think it worth updating her. She is peripheral to this case, the bones expert, the slightly eccentric academic. She is outside the main action. Max had lied to her, probably used her to get news of the Woolmarket Street site. Nelson forgets her the instant that he gets the scent of a breakthrough. The only person who thinks she is central to the case, she thinks bitterly, is the madman who keeps leaving museum exhibits for her to find.

But then, as the birds start gathering over the Saltmarsh for their evening spectacular, thousands of little black dots like iron filings dividing and converging against the sky, Ruth sees a black Range Rover draw up beside her gate. Max.

She goes to the door, uncertain how she feels. On one hand she just wants to know what the hell is going on, on the other she has decidedly mixed feelings about Max Grey. Martin Black, of course, she doesn't know at all.

He looks desperately tired, chalk white with dark rings under his eyes. Five hours of questioning by Nelson can't be fun for anyone, of course, but Ruth now realises that he has been looking strained for some time, probably ever since the news of the body under the doorway. No, before that, from the moment he realised that Ruth's site was the old children's home, when she asked him about the words cut into the archway. Despite herself, Ruth feels sorry for him.

'How are you?' she asks.

'I've felt better.'

'Do you want a cup of tea?'

'A drink would be good.'

She gets him a glass of wine and makes herself a herbal tea (so disgusting that it must be good for her).

They sit for a minute in silence then Max says, 'I'm sorry.'

'What for?'

'For lying to you.'

'You didn't exactly lie, you just didn't tell me.'

He smiles. 'Father Hennessey would say that was the same thing.'

'It's incredible that he recognised you after all that time.'

'He said it was partly the setting. Seeing me standing by the archway. Jesus—when you asked me what those words meant! They're burned into my heart.'

He takes a gulp of wine. His hands are shaking.

'What happened at the police station?' Ruth asks.

'Oh, Nelson took a statement. Went on for hours. They took fingerprints and everything. Talked to Father Hennessey too but they wouldn't let him stay when they questioned me.'

'What did they question you about?'

'My disappearance. After all, I've been a missing person for over thirty years. And about Elizabeth.'

His voice breaks when he says her name. He rubs his eyes.

Ruth says gently, 'You said she died?'

Max looks up and now his eyes are hard. He stares at Ruth as if he doesn't see her.

'She died,' he says. And he is not talking to Ruth but to someone else, himself perhaps, and she knows, somehow, that it is twelve-year-old Martin Black who is speaking.

'We wanted to get to our dad. I'd had it all planned. I'd got his address from Father Hennessey's records. He always let me go into his office. I stole enough food to last us. I'd even got a tent from the storehouse—Father Hennessey used to take us camping sometimes. It was all fixed but Elizabeth ... she didn't really want to go. She liked it at the home. She loved Sister James, the nun who taught the little ones. She felt safe there. But she loved me more.' For a second he sounds almost triumphant. 'She loved me so she went with me. Only thing she wanted to take was her blasted stuffed dog.'

And Ruth sees Max's bed on the boat: the classical text open on the side table and the stuffed toy on the pillow. Elizabeth's dog.

'At first it was OK. We stayed in an abandoned warehouse the first night and then we headed for London. I'd brought our old school uniforms. I knew they wouldn't be looking for children in uniform and I was lucky. There was a school trip to London that day so we tagged along behind them. No one noticed us. But when we got to London, that's when it started.'

'What started?'

'Elizabeth got sick. She'd always had lots of sore throats and colds so at first I thought it was that. I stole some throat stuff for her and she seemed better for a while. We were staying outside Swindon in an empty school. We had to head west, you see, to Holyhead. Jesus—that school. It had big snakes and ladders painted on the playground, on the tarmac. Elizabeth was scared of them. At night she thought they were coming to get her. We were sleeping in the staffroom. They had sofas in there. But she had a fever, she used to scream. It was like she didn't know me. She used to scream for our mum.'

His voice has all but died away. He is sitting slumped forward, head in hands. Flint has abandoned him. Ruth doesn't want to hear any more. The thought that the five-year-old Elizabeth might have died in that empty school, with only her twelve-year-old brother to care for her, is almost too awful to contemplate. And, if she can't contemplate it, what about Max, who has kept this secret all these years? But Ruth also feels that, having started telling his story, it would be good for him to finish it. So she prompts gently, 'What happened?'

Max looks at her, his gaze anguished. 'She died. Just like that. I woke up one morning and she was dead. Lying on the sofa with a rug over her and she was dead. Her little face was cold...' He turns away and, after a few seconds, continues in a harder voice. 'I buried her in the school grounds. They had a little vegetable patch where the earth was soft and I buried her there. I was going to bury Wolfie, her dog, with her but, when it came to it, I couldn't bear to. It smelt of her, you see. I buried her and I went on. I suppose Nelson will dig her up now. Bit of a shock for some poor primary school.' He laughs harshly.

'What happened to you?'

'Oh, I got to Ireland but when I saw my dad, he was drunk as a lord, didn't know me from Adam, so I didn't hang around. I lived rough for a while and got taken in by some travellers, gypsies. They were kind to me. I used to help with the horses, they went to lots of horse fairs and they had ponies that just roamed free, even in the cities. The children went to local schools sometimes. I went with them and got interested in history again. Met a teacher in one school who liked me and he encouraged me to stay and take some exams. I lived with him and his family. They were kind too. I called myself Max Grey by then. I took O Levels and A Levels and, eventually, got into Sussex. End of story.'

'Why did you come back here?' asks Ruth.

'Well, mostly it was the Roman dig. I am an archaeologist after all. But I suppose I wanted to see the home again. I wanted to but I was scared. DCI Nelson said that runaways almost always go back to the place that they ran away from. Well, I suppose I was no exception. Then, when you were excavating the site, I couldn't believe it. I wanted to tell you, Ruth, I really did.'

He is looking at her earnestly. Martin Black has vanished and he is Max Grey again, soft-spoken and unthreatening.

'That's OK,' she says, 'it must have been ... awful for you.' She is aware how inadequate this sounds.

'I couldn't face going to the site at first, but then I couldn't resist it. I suppose I just wanted to see it one last time. Then, seeing Father Hennessey like that...'

'I think he was very fond of you.'

'He was really good to me. I was a delinquent in those days. Got into fights, swore, stole, but he never gave up on me. He always thought I'd make something of myself.'

'He was right,' says Ruth.

'Was he?' They look at each other and suddenly the moment is charged, by sadness, understanding and, unexpectedly, by something else, something that makes Ruth blush and turn away.

'Ruth?'

But the spell is broken by the doorbell. Judy Johnson is on the doorstep, an overnight bag in her hand.

'Hi, Ruth. I've come to stay for a few nights.'

CHAPTER 25

The DNA results are waiting on Nelson's desk when he gets into work in the morning. He studies them, black coffee in hand. They prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that Roderick Spens is related to the body found under the doorway. More than that, they show that Roderick and the dead child share a common male ancestor. Nelson frowns down at the printout in his hand, thinking hard.

Finding Martin Black had been a bolt from the blue. Despite his theory about offenders returning to the scene of the crime, Nelson never honestly expected to find Martin Black wandering around the ruins of the former children's home. And never in a million years did he connect the smug archaeologist who seems to dog Ruth's footsteps with the twelve-year-old boy who went missing. 'People grow up,' he always tells his team, 'you're not looking for a little boy, you're looking for a man in his forties.' But, even so, the distance between Dr Max Grey and desperate runaway Martin Black seemed too vast to be straddled by one person.

And his story—his story had been heart-rending. The little girl dying in the empty school (possibly of meningitis, Nelson suspects), the grief-stricken brother burying the body. It is just outlandish enough to be true. Well, they'll know when they find the school and dig up their vegetable patch. The press will love that.

Briefing is at nine. Tanya has her notebook open in front of her, Clough enters the room still chewing, Judy is drinking tea.

'Everything all right at Ruth's?' Nelson asks her.

'Not a sound all night.'

'Is Ruth OK?'

Judy looks at him curiously. 'She seems fine. She had a friend there when I turned up.'

'Who?'

'That archaeologist chap. The one who was here yesterday.'

'We need to talk about him,' says Nelson. He tells the team about the unexpected appearance of Martin Black.

'Bloody hell,' says Clough, still chasing stray bits of breakfast around his mouth, 'was it really him?'

'Father Hennessey verifies it. According to Black, he and his sister ran away, hoping to get to Ireland. Elizabeth became ill and died in a deserted school outside Swindon.'

'Do you believe him?" asks Clough.

'I never believe anyone without checking first. But, in any case, we've established that the body at Woolmarket Street can't be Elizabeth Black. We've had the DNA results,' he pauses impressively, 'and they show that Sir Roderick Spens and the dead child share a common male ancestor.'

'So it could be Annabelle Spens?' gasps Judy.

'It's possible. Tanya, how are you getting on with tracing Annabelle's dental records?'

'It's difficult,' says Tanya, rather defensively Nelson thinks. 'I've been through all the dentists operating in Norwich in the forties and fifties. None of them are still practising and their records have vanished.'

'Keep trying,' says Nelson. 'According to our expert there was some pretty fancy dental work done on that little girl.'

'If the child is Annabelle Spens,' says Judy slowly, 'who could have killed her? It was a really brutal death, stabbed and then beheaded.'

'I don't know,' says Nelson, 'but I do know that in cases where a child has been murdered the killer is almost always one of the family.'

'Christopher Spens?'

'It's possible. He sounds a nutcase to me. All that stuff about Latin. Roderick Spens said his father kept a shrine to the Roman Gods in his garden. The well too. That was built by him, to an authentic Roman design apparently.'

'What about the mother?' asks Tanya. 'What was she like?'

'Sir Roderick says she was "like an angel" but I get the impression that he didn't really know her that well. Probably brought up by a nanny. The mother died quite young, in 1957.'

'Only a few years after her daughter,' says Judy, 'probably died of grief.'

'This isn't a woman's magazine,' says Nelson, 'she died of pneumonia. Quite common in those days.'

'All the same,' says Clough, 'they were an unlucky family, weren't they?'

Ruth is having trouble working. Having Judy in the house forced her to get up early, offer to make tea, etc. But Judy said that she would get something at the station. She left at eight, looking far more together than Ruth ever manages before ten a.m., or indeed ever.

It had been unexpectedly pleasant to have company last night. Max had left almost as soon as Judy arrived and that had been a bit of a relief too. She feels that she needs time to absorb Max's story, to come to terms that Max Grey is, in fact, Martin Black. How could anyone go through all that and emerge the other side apparently normal and well-adjusted? If she had ever thought about Max's childhood she would have imagined a middle-class home, public or maybe grammar school, a smooth transition to university, the usual relationships and friendships along the way. Never a children's home, a dead sister, living rough, adopted by gypsies. Jesus—it's like
Wuthering Heights.
And there is, she admits, something slightly Heathcliffy about Max.

Ruth sits down at her table by the window. It is a dull morning, the grey marsh merging seamlessly with the grey sky. She opens her computer but, after staring at her lectures notes for a minute, closes it again. She opens a drawer and gets out a beautiful clean piece of paper. One of the few things she and Nelson have in common is a liking for lists. At the top of her list Ruth writes:
Woolmarket Street.
Then she lists everyone she knows who is connected to the site.

Children's Home

Father Hennessey

Max Grey
(she stares at this name for a second before crossing it out and writing
Martin Black
)

Kevin Davies, undertaker

Other former residents

Staff
(Max had mentioned a Sister James and she knows that Judy went to Southport to interview another nun)

Building Site

Edward Spens

Foreman and other building workers

Ted

Trace

She looks at the list for so long that Flint becomes bored and tries to sit on it. Ruth pushes him off. Anyone on the list could have put the two-headed calf on her doorstep, could have put the baby in the trench and written her name on the Roman wall. Of all the names, she has to face the fact that Max is the most likely. He knows about Roman ritual, he was the one who told her all that
I, Claudius
stuff in the first place; he has had the means and the opportunity. He was there when she found the writing on the wall. He was the one who found her in the trench after she had fainted. What if he had been there all along? What if he was the one who put the baby there (it was only the night before, after all, that she told him that she was pregnant)? As an archaeologist, he would have access to the museum; he could easily have got hold of the two-headed calf and the model baby too.

But why? Why would Max want to scare her, scare her to death, as he himself put it? To warn her away from the Woolmarket Street site? To prevent her from discovering his identity as Martin Black? Or is there some other mystery concerned with the old children's home?

She looks at the list again. If the body under the door was killed over fifty years ago, there is only one person who was alive at the time. Father Patrick Hennessey. Well maybe there are still some nuns or other staff members alive but Father Hennessey is the only one she knows. If there is a secret, he will be the one who knows it. Don't priests always know secrets? Isn't that the whole point of the Catholic confessional?

When they met at the site, Father Hennessey had given her his card. At the time, she had thought it amusing that a priest would possess something as worldly as a business card. Father Patrick Hennessey SJ it says, in discreet grey capitals. She has no idea what SJ stands for and she doesn't want to know. On the other hand, it wouldn't hurt to meet him again and ask him a few questions of her own.

Her hand hovers by the phone.

Judy is sitting at her desk, fuming. Bastard! How
dare
he sneer at her. 'This isn't a woman's magazine.' And in front of Tanya Fuller too. Judy likes Tanya. She's fun on a night out and she certainly provides a welcome antidote to Clough and the rest of the lads. But Judy also knows that Tanya is competition.

Judy has been in the police force for three years. She's a graduate (something she doesn't often mention to Nelson) and, as such, on the so-called 'fast track' to success. When, after eighteen months, she'd been given the transfer to CID she felt that she really was on the way up. She loves detective work and she gets on well with Nelson whose bark is definitely worse than his bite. He may sound like an unreconstructed male chauvinist but, in practice, he is fair to the women in his team and (unlike some DCIs) does not view them as useful only in cases of rape or domestic violence. But somehow Judy feels that her career has stalled. She is a Detective Constable, by now she should be a Detective Sergeant, like Clough. She knows that Nelson has the funding for another sergeant so why hasn't he given her the stripes? At least until Tanya Fuller turned up she could be sure that she was the best candidate for the job. But now Tanya breezes in from another force with her intelligent questions and her eyes fixed adoringly on Nelson's face. What if Nelson promotes Tanya over Judy? She couldn't bear it. She'd jack it all in and become a bookie like her dad.

Judy is meant to be helping Tanya with the dentist search but instead she is going over the notes from the case. She is sure they are all missing something. And, if she spots it, that will mean one in the eye for Nelson, Tanya, all of them.

Idly she sketches a Spens family tree. She met Edward Spens once at a police do and found him rather attractive. This doesn't affect her deep-seated belief that his family have something to hide.

She looks hard at the name Rosemary Spens. She hears Nelson's voice, speaking in the flat tone he uses for briefings: 'Sir Roderick says she was "like an angel" but I get the impression that he didn't really know her that well. Probably brought up by a nanny.' That's it. Judy goes back to the file and rifles through until she comes to the census of 1951. She remembers Clough reading it out to them: 'Christopher Spens, Rosemary Spens, children Roderick and Annabelle.' But, typically, Clough has overlooked something and Nelson's casual words have brought it back to her. There would have been other people in the house—servants, a cook and almost certainly a nanny. And, sure enough, there are four other names on the list:

Lily Wright—cook general

Susan Baker—domestic

Edna Dawes—domestic

Orla McKinley—nanny

Judy looks at the last name for a long time.

Clough, swallowing the last of a chunky doughnut-to-go, is in a stonemason's studio. The air is thick with dust and out of the fog loom disembodied shapes—columns, fireplaces, the occasional half-finished statue, horses and angels and Greek goddesses. Clough walks carefully through the stone figures thinking that it's like a book he read as a child where a witch turned her enemies into stone and then decorated her house with them. Either that or a graveyard.

They have had a bit of luck with the stonemason. The firm who made Christopher Spens' archway in 1956 are still in business. The actual mason has retired but his son is now in charge and has volunteered to bring his old dad into the studio to talk to the police. Clough now wends his way slowly towards the back of the vast room where the comforting sounds of Radio 1 are mingling with the smell of reheated coffee and calor gas. Clough sniffs appreciatively.

An old man is sitting in an armchair in from of the gas stove. A younger man, presumably the son, is chipping away at a small block of marble. Duffy is begging for mercy in the background.

'Mr Wilson?' Clough extends a hand. 'Detective Sergeant Clough.'

The old man holds out a thin hand in a fingerless glove. 'Mr Wilson senior. Reginald Wilson. I assume it's me you wanted?'

'Well, yes, sir. As I explained to your son on the phone, we're interested in an archway you built in 1956, on Woolmarket Street. For Christopher Spens.'

Reginald Wilson gestures towards a cloth-bound book on his lap marked, in black ink, 1954–1958. 'It's all in the book. I always say to Stephen here, put it in the book. You never know when you might want to refer to it. But it's all computers these days. Not as safe as a book.' The younger man rolls his eyes good-naturedly.

Clough follows the shaking finger to an entry marked in pencil. 'Stone archway and portico. Portico with Roman-style columns. Archway, stand-alone, granite. Eight foot by four. Inscription to read: Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit.'

'Latin,' says Clough. 'Gobbledegook, eh?'

'I studied Latin at school,' says Reginald Wilson mildly. 'It's a fairly well-known saying. It was important to Mr Spens, I think, because of his daughter dying. He said that the arch was a memorial to her, a sign that nothing was ever really lost.'

Feeling snubbed, Clough says, 'What sort of a man was Christopher Spens?'

Wilson is silent for a moment, holding his hands out towards the fire. Then he says, 'He was always very courteous to me. Treated me as a craftsman. That's important in our line of work. But he was distant, if you know what I mean. Of course, he'd lost a child and that changes you. But he was a difficult man to know, that was my impression.'

'What about his wife, Rosemary?'

'I hardly saw her. I understood she was a bit of an invalid. We saw the son though, nice lad, he helped us dig.'

'Roderick?'

'Yes. He runs the business now, doesn't he?'

'His son, Edward.'

'Ah, fathers and sons.' Reginald Wilson glances at his son, working industriously on the marble, its sides shining in the light from the fire. 'That's what it's all about, isn't it? Passing the business on to your son. That's the only reason why any of us do it.'

On the way out, moving through the stone menagerie, Clough remembers the name of the book.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
He must remember to tell Judy. She's always saying that he never reads anything.