The Janus Stone (5 page)

CHAPTER 7

Nelson is in his car, one of his favourite places, doing one of his favourite things, driving to interrogate a suspect. Of course, Whitcliffe would say that he is 'merely popping down to have a chat' with Father Patrick Hennessey, ex-principal of the Sacred Heart Children's Home. There is, as yet, no crime. Ruth's skeleton has, as yet, no age and no sex. But Nelson has been a policeman long enough to smell wrongdoing. As soon as he looked into that trench ('grave' is how he thinks of it), as soon as he saw the bones, so small and oddly vulnerable curled up in the foetal position, he knew. He knew that he was looking at a murder victim. And, if the bones do turn out to be medieval, or even bloody Iron Age again, he knows that he will still be right. That body, that child, was murdered.

When Nelson is asked what's the worst thing about being a policeman, he sometimes answers 'the smell'. It is partly meant as a rather grim joke but, in fact, it conceals an even grimmer truth. Villains, the feral, rat-like kind, do smell. As a young policeman, Nelson once had to accompany a convicted paedophile from court to prison. Being locked in the back of a van with this scum for a sixty-mile journey was one of the worst experiences of his life. Nelson remembers the man had actually tried to talk to him. Had even, incredible as it seems, wanted to be friendly. 'Don't. fucking. talk. to. me.' Nelson had spat, before they had even reached the outskirts of Manchester. But it is the smell that he remembers most. This man would obviously have had a shower in prison but he absolutely
stank:
a fetid, rotten smell that reeked of unwashed clothes, windowless rooms, of fear and unspeakable obsession. When he got home that night, Nelson had washed and showered three times but sometimes, even today, he can still smell it. The stench of evil.

Places smell too. The downstairs loo where he once found the body of a little girl, murdered by her mother; the garbage-strewn backstreet where he saw a colleague stabbed to death; the desolate beach where he and Ruth unearthed the body of another dead girl. There may not have been an actual smell but there was something in the air, heaviness, a sense of secrecy and of things left to fester and rot.

And Nelson had smelt it on that building site. No matter how many years had passed since that little body was buried beneath the floorboards, the smell was still there. It's a murder scene; Nelson is sure of it.

The children's home had closed in 1981; afterwards the building had been used as some sort of council offices. Now Edward Spens is planning to build seventy-five luxury apartments on the site.

'Seventy-five!' Nelson had echoed, when Edward Spens had told him. 'Seventy-five luxury rabbit hutches more like.'

Edward Spens had, of course, been on the phone as soon as Nelson and Clough had got back to the station. He'd been very cordial and full of phrases like 'my duty as a citizen' but had, nevertheless, managed to drop in a few mentions of his very good friend Gerry Whitcliffe and the city's need for new housing, job creation, urban redevelopment la di da di da.

'I appreciate your frustration, sir,' Nelson had said, 'but you must understand that we have a suspected murder enquiry.'

'Murder?' Spens had sounded shocked as Nelson had meant him to be. 'But those bones could be hundreds of years old. That archaeologist chap Ted was telling me that there used to be a medieval churchyard on the site.'

'That's as maybe, sir. I've got Dr Ruth Galloway from the university examining the bones now. I'm hoping that in a few days she'll be able to give me an approximate date.'

'This Ruth Galloway, is she the best person? I know Phil Trent up at the university. He might be able to get us someone more ... senior.'

'Dr Galloway is head of forensic archaeology,' Nelson replied stiffly, 'and an acknowledged expert on bones.' Ruth always claims that this makes her sound like a sniffer dog but, for the present, Spens seemed satisfied.

Spens is losing money, Nelson reflects, not without satisfaction, as he turns off the M25 towards Gatwick. Everyone is talking about the property market caving in. Nelson loathes TV programmes about smug yuppies buying and selling houses but even he has gathered that much. All those smug yuppies will soon be saddled with negative equity and serve them right. His own house is mortgaged up to the hilt, of course, but that doesn't bother him. Nelson was brought up in a council house. For him, a mortgage is a sign of respectability.

But, even so, Spens had better start building quickly or there will be no one left to buy his luxury apartments. Luxury! Nelson snorts as he overtakes a coach loaded with German tourists. Where there was once one, admittedly large, house, now there will be seventy-five soulless shoe-boxes. It's not his definition of luxury. Actually, he's not sure he possesses one.

Father Patrick Hennessey lives in a church-run 'retreat' in West Sussex. He explains on the phone that this is a sort of retirement placing for priests. 'People come here for a week or even just for a few days, to recharge their spiritual batteries. I wander around asking them if they want to talk to a priest and, when they say no, I wander off again.' Nice work if you can get it, thinks Nelson. It is a beautiful May morning, the fields lush and green, the trees heavy with blossom. As he drives past yet another rose-strewn cottage, Nelson reflects how much he prefers this countryside to Norfolk. Everything is contained: a single oak stands in a gated field, flint cottages surround a pond, gentle hills form perfect framing devices for picturesque villages. There is no threatening expanse of sky, none of the windswept desolation that he so dislikes about his adopted county. Even so, you'd need a ton of money to live here. The villages are heavy on antique shops and low on fast-food outlets. He has to weave his way through a slalom of BMWs, Porsches and shiny Land Rovers. Definitely a cushy retirement billet.

'Can't stand the place,' says Father Patrick Hennessey cheerfully, stomping out over the smooth green lawn to shake Nelson heartily by the hand.

The strength of the handshake does not surprise Nelson. He has met priests like this before; burly, red-faced Irishmen who look more like ex-boxers than clerics. Hennessey is elderly, seventies Nelson reckons, and walks with a stick, but he has a definite physical presence, with shoulders as broad as Nelson's own, a white crew cut and a nose that has clearly been broken several times.

'Why not?' asks Nelson as they walk towards a shady seat overlooking the rose garden. 'Seems a beautiful spot to me.'

'Beautiful,' says Hennessey gloomily, 'yes, I suppose so. But it bores the hell out of me. People talk about seeing God's hand in nature but, in my opinion, when you've seen one tree you've seen them all. Now, when I see a beautiful building and I think of how God has given man the wits to build it, that's worth celebrating. Have you seen the Gherkin in London? Pure poetry.'

'I'm a city boy myself,' says Nelson cautiously, 'but buildings don't make me think about God exactly.'

Hennessey gives him a rather sharp look. His eyes are very light blue in a weather-beaten face. Intelligent eyes, watchful eyes. And, like his handshake, not particularly gentle.

He lowers himself onto the bench and stretches one leg stiffly in front of him. 'So, Detective Chief Inspector Nelson, you said you wanted to talk to me about SHCH.'

Sacred Heart Children's Home, Nelson works out silently. He hates acronyms. Whitcliffe, of course, loves them.

'Yes,' he says brusquely, 'as you may know, the site is being developed. The plan is to build a number of luxury apartments.'

'Dear God.'

'And in the course of the building work a discovery has been made. A body. Skeleton to be precise, buried under the main doorway. It looks to be that of a child.'

Nelson pauses. Silence, as any policemen knows, is the best way to get information.

But Hennessey, it seems, knows the same trick. He fixes Nelson with his cool, light-blue stare. For a few seconds, neither speaks. An elderly couple walk slowly past them and disappear through a rose-smothered archway.

'We're examining the bones now,' says Nelson, admitting defeat. 'It's possible they predate the home, of course.'

'It's an ancient site, I understand,' says Hennessey. 'I had always heard that there was a church there once. I believe it had the reputation of curing lepers.'

A church. That archaeologist bloke had said a churchyard but, of course, it stands to reason that there would be a church there too. Also that, to Hennessey, the church would be the important factor.

'Our forensic archaeology team,' says Nelson, thinking that this is a rather grand way of describing Ruth, Trace and Irish Ted, 'believe that the grave was dug fairly recently. Maybe when the doorway was put in place.'

'The house was old in my time,' says Father Hennessey mildly, 'but I assume that you suspect the body was placed there within living memory.'

'I assume nothing,' says Nelson. 'Just wondered if, during your years as principal, you ever had a child go missing. Or anything,' he adds after a pause.

Hennessey gets up. 'Let's walk,' he says. 'I get stiff if I sit too long.'

They walk through the archway and between the raised flower beds. Hennessey lets his hand drift amongst the velvety blossoms. 'Stupid things,' he says. 'Could never see the point of flowers.'

Nelson does the silent trick again and this time is successful. After a few hundred yards, Hennessey says, 'Let's get this straight, Detective Chief Inspector, there was never any abuse at SHCH when I was there. You can ask anyone. I'm still in touch with many of our former residents. They've all got good memories of their time with us. I know the fashion is to look for abuse wherever you see a Catholic priest but, in this instance, you will look in vain.' He stops, frowning at a particularly vivid pink rose which is swarming up a low stone wall. 'Nevertheless...'

Now we're getting to it, thinks Nelson, careful to keep his face expressionless.

'Nevertheless...' Hennessey sighs. 'Two children did go missing when I was principal. A boy and a girl. There was a huge search but we never found them. I've often wondered...' His voice drifts off.

'What were their names?' Nelson gets out his notebook.

'Black. Martin and Elizabeth Black.'

'Ages?'

'Martin was twelve and Elizabeth was five.'

Five. Nelson thinks of the little skeleton crouched under the wall.

'When did they go missing?'

'The early seventies. 1973, I think.'

'Have you any idea why they ran away?'

Hennessey starts to walk again. They leave the rose garden and walk down the hill towards an ornamental lake. People sit on benches by the water but no one is speaking. Perhaps they are all praying, thinks Nelson. He is beginning to find the place rather spooky.

'Martin was a bright boy,' says Hennessey, 'a very bright boy. Their mother had died and Martin became obsessed with finding their father, who'd gone back to Ireland. I think we all assumed that's where the children had gone but, when we tracked the father down, he had no idea where they were. He hardly knew what day it was. He was an alcoholic, in a terrible state, but the police didn't suspect him of any wrongdoing.'

'And they dropped the case?'

'Eventually. I paid a private investigator to go on searching but he came up with nothing. And we prayed, of course.' He smiles, rather sadly.

'Did you ever suspect that they'd been ... abducted?'

Hennessey looks at him angrily. They are almost exactly the same height. 'I suspected that maybe a stranger ... But if you're implying that someone in SHCH ... Never! We all adored the children. Little Elizabeth was ... she was an angel.'

And Martin wasn't, suspects Nelson. Aloud he says, 'We'll investigate further. Thank you, Father, you've been very helpful.'

As they walk back up to the car park, Hennessey says, 'You said it looks like a child's skeleton—do you know how old the child was?'

'No,' says Nelson, 'the bones are still in the ground so we haven't been able to examine them properly. Also, the head is missing.'

'Missing?'

'Yes. We don't know why that it is.'

'The world is a strange and cruel place, Detective Chief Inspector.'

'It certainly is.'

They have reached Nelson's car and the priest holds out his hand. As they exchange vice-like grips, Hennessey says, 'I believe you're a Catholic, Detective Chief Inspector.'

Nelson drops his hand. 'How did you know?'

Hennessey smiles sweetly. 'You called me Father. Just Father. A non-Catholic would have said Father Hennessey, or even Father Patrick if they wanted to be all happy-clappy about it.'

'I haven't been to church for years,' says Nelson.

'Don't give up on God entirely,' says the priest, still smiling. 'There's always the twitch upon the thread. God bless you, my son.'

When he gets back to the station, Nelson laboriously Googles 'the twitch upon the thread' and comes up with a quotation from G.K. Chesterton: 'I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'

'Bollocks,' says Nelson, switching off the computer.

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 heartbreakingly 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.