The Janus Stone

Ruth doesn’t cook much (although she loves reading cookery books, preferably with pictures of Tuscan olive groves) and she slightly resents cooking for Tanya. It had been all right with Judy but preparing a meal for this stranger sitting on the sofa picking cat’s fur off her black trousers, this is different and slightly stressful. Nevertheless Ruth cooks pasta and sauce and mixes a salad. She and Tanya chat in a desultory manner as they eat. Ruth learns that Tanya is twenty five and has been in the police force four years, she is a graduate (sports science) and she thinks keeping fit is a moral imperative. Ruth listens to this in silence, helping herself to an extra piece of garlic bread. Tanya thinks Norfolk is ‘very nice’, her colleagues are ‘very nice’ and Nelson is also ‘very nice’.

‘Don’t you find him a bit of a bully?’

‘No. He’s been very nice to me.’

He’s been nice to me too, thinks Ruth, and look where that got me. She looks out of the window and thinks of Nelson and that night, four months ago, when he turned up unexpectedly at her front door. The sun is setting over the marshes and the birds wheel into the air, shifting black clouds against the deep blue sky.

‘Beautiful view,’ says Tanya politely.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ says Ruth. She thinks of the Saltmarsh and its secrets: the hidden causeway, the henge, the bodies buried where the land meets the sea. Last year she had nearly died on the marshes. She had thought that the danger was over and that she could live quietly for a while. But somehow danger seems to have found her again.

Tanya eats a tiny amount of pasta, pausing between each mouthful. Ruth has finished her second helping before Tanya has eaten her first. They drink water (‘I’m on duty’) and Tanya reacts to the offer of pudding as if Ruth had tried to sell her drugs. Ruth eats a slice of chocolate cake and wonders what the hell they are going to talk about all evening. Perhaps they can just watch TV.

She is about to suggest this when, without warning, the lights go out. Tanya jumps up, alert at once.

‘It’s OK,’ says Ruth, ‘it’s only the fuse. It does that occasionally. The box is out the back.’

The fuse box is in a small outhouse in the back garden. Ruth’s neighbours, the weekenders, have converted their outhouse into another bathroom but Ruth’s just contains rusty gardening equipment, a defunct exercise bicycle and the remains of a rotary washing line.

‘I’ll go,’ says Tanya.

‘Don’t be silly. It’s right by the back door. Anyway, you’d never find the box. There’s no light in the shed.’

Ruth puts on her shoes and opens the kitchen door. It is dark outside and a fresh, salty wind is blowing. She steps into the garden, feeling for the side of the shed with one hand. She can feel the flint wall, the rotting wood of the door. She reaches out to touch the handle.

And encounters living flesh.

CHAPTER 27

Ruth screams. She is aware of a smell, lemon and sandal-wood, and then the world goes black. She is fighting for breath; she can’t see or feel anything. She falls to the ground, scraping her knee on stone.

‘Ruth!’ Tanya’s voice, muffled but close.

Something is pulled from over Ruth’s head and she can see again. The night sky looks extraordinarily bright after the previous total blackness. Ruth is kneeling on the floor by the shed and Tanya is standing beside her, holding a heavy black cloth.

‘What happened?’ Tanya sounds very shaken. Whether it is concern for Ruth or fear of what Nelson would say if anything happened to her, Ruth doesn’t know.

‘I came out. I was feeling for the wall and I felt… a person. Someone was standing there, right by the wall. I touched them. Their face, I think. I heard them breathing. Then it all went black.’

‘They threw this over you.’ Tanya indicated the black cloth. ‘It’s weighted at the bottom,’ she says.

‘That’s why I couldn’t get it off.’ Ruth struggles to her feet. Now that the fear has subsided, she feels rather foolish. There is something infinitely ridiculous about being wrapped in a cloth, like a budgie in a cage.

Tanya pushes open the shed door. ‘Is there anyone there?’ she calls, her voice admirably steady. No answer but Flint nearly gives them both a heart attack by jumping heavily from the roof, landing with a thump on the grass.

‘Let’s get you inside,’ says Tanya. ‘I’ll come back out here with a torch.’

But Ruth doesn’t want to stay indoors on her own, so she follows Tanya back out into the garden. Tanya flashes her torch around the tiny shed. Its beam illuminates the collection of rusty iron and plastic, the fuse box on the wall, the festoons of cobwebs – but nothing else. She gestures towards the fuse box, all the switches have been pushed down.

‘Someone did that deliberately,’ she says, ‘and look at the doorway. No cobwebs there.’

She shines her torch downwards and there, on the dusty earth floor, between a shovel and the plastic strings of the washing line, is a single footprint.

‘Bingo,’ says Tanya.