The Janus Stone

What is it about that name that rings alarm bells in Judy’s mind? Ignoring the on-screen attempts to blow up the Empire State Building (the genre is post-9/11 apocalypse), she runs the last few hours through her internal scanner. Judy has an excellent memory – another reason why bloody Nelson should promote her. Jocasta… Jocasta. There. She has it.

I was only twenty-three. He called me his Jocasta.

The next minute, Judy is stumbling out of the cinema, oblivious to the fact that she will now never know whether Todd, Brad and Shannon manage to save the planet. In the foyer, she sits on the dusty, popcorn-strewn steps and rummages for her BlackBerry. She keys Jocasta into the search engine and there it is: ‘Jocasta was a famed queen of Thebes. She was the wife of Laius, mother and later wife of Oedipus…’

Mother and later wife of Oedipus.

Oedipus had inadvertently married his mother, hence the complex. Why would Sir Christopher, a much older man, call Orla ‘his Jocasta’? Judy scans further back in her memory, to the Spens family tree that she had scribbled in her notebook. Roderick: born 1938. If Orla/Sister Immaculata is seventy five now, she must have been born in 1933. When the baby died, she was twenty-three. Roderick would have been eighteen. He called me his Jocasta.

Judy dials Nelson’s number.

But Nelson ignores the call. He is staring at a six-word text message: I’m going to kill your daughter.

30th June Day of Aestas

I got my knife and went indoors. All was quiet. The mother was washing clothes in the laundry, the maids had the morning off. I went into her room. The blinds were drawn and the light was pinkish, like the light on the inside of your eyelids.

Her eyes are blue, like mine. I’ve never noticed that before. Her lips move as if she’s about to say something. She doesn’t say much (another sign of her backwardness) but it looks as if she’s about to say something now. I decide I’d better speak first.

‘Hallo,’ I say.

‘’Lo,’ she replies.

CHAPTER 30

Nelson is running, faster than he has ever run in his life. Twice in his police career his life has been in danger and, even at the time, he’d been quite pleased at how he’d handled this. The knowledge that he might have been about to die had sharpened his reactions, made them cold and precise. He had not been scared so much as angry and determined not to let the perpetrators get away with it. But this, this is something else altogether. His heart is leaping in his chest, huge shuddering movements that make him feel sick and dizzy. He lurches as he runs, coordination shot, breath coming in shallow, painful spasms. His daughter. Someone is going to hurt one of his daughters. It is as if they have already cut out his heart.

He reaches his car and looks at his watch. Three thirty. Think. Focus. He forces himself to take deeper breaths, gripping the steering wheel. Like this, he is no good to anyone. Where should Laura and Rebecca be at three thirty? Just leaving school. If he hurries, he can be there in five minutes.

If he hurries… Nelson leaves a trail of bemused and terrified road users behind him as he drives, mostly on the wrong side of the road, to the girls’ school on the outskirts of King’s Lynn. The siren is blaring and he barely slows down for anything, red lights, junctions, pedestrians, anything. Finally, he screeches to a halt beside the school, mounting the kerb, scraping the side of the car against the wall.

The rain has stopped and teenage girls are pouring out of the school gates, all wearing purple sweatshirts and short black skirts. His heart leaps every time he sees a girl with long brown hair but there are so many of them, so many slim girls with minuscule skirts and long, wavy hair, but not one of them is his. His heart pounds harder than ever and he can hear himself making a moaning sound under his breath, almost a whimper. Please God, he prays madly to the God whom he has ignored for most of his adult life, please God make them be all right.

And then, in a knot of purple sweatshirts, he sees Paige, Rebecca’s best friend, ambling along without a care in the world, chatting to a plump girl with hair dyed a virulent pink.

‘Paige!’ Nelson’s bellow makes every head turn in his direction. ‘Paige!’