The Janus Stone

‘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.

19th June Festival for Minerva

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.