The Janus Stone

Desperately she tries to remember what has happened. She was in the trench, looking at the Janus Stone. She can see the two stone faces looking up at her, sinister and impassive. Then someone spoke to her. Who was it? She remembers that she wasn’t scared, just curious and slightly annoyed at the interruption. She remembers getting out of the trench and going to look at something in a car. Then something must have frightened her because she tried to ring Nelson. After that – nothing.

‘Ah. You’ve woken up.’

Ruth turns and sees what should have been clear all along. She is in a boat, very like Max’s boat. Hang on, it is Max’s boat. She can see the stuffed dog, Elizabeth’s dog, grinning at her from the bed. She is lying on the galley seat. The sink and cooker where once Max cooked her a gourmet meal, are opposite her. The herbs are still swinging picturesquely from the ceiling. And, standing on the step leading down from the deck, is Sir Roderick Spens. What’s he doing here?

‘Can you help me?’ she says. ‘I’m tied up.’

Inexplicably Roderick lets out a high-pitched giggle. ‘Tied up? So you are. Dr Galloway’s busy. She’s tied up.’

Ruth does not know what is happening but she knows that she is suddenly very scared. And Roderick’s face, so mild-looking with its faded blue eyes and fringe of white hair, is the scariest thing of all.

‘Let me go,’ she says, trying to sound authoritative.

‘Oh I can’t let you go,’ says Roderick, still sounding gently amused. ‘You have what I want, you see?’

‘What?’

‘You have Detective Inspector Harry Nelson’s baby. You lay with him and now you’re with child. You’re carrying his daughter. That’s what I want.’

Ruth stares, cold with horror. The archaic language ‘lay with him… with child’ only serves to heighten the horror. Somehow this old man knows her secret, that she is carrying Nelson’s baby, and he is going to use this knowledge in some terrible way.

Still smiling, Sir Roderick approaches and Ruth sees the dull gleam of a knife.

‘I want the baby,’ he repeats.

Nelson stares at Cathbad.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Max Grey. I think he’s got something to do with Ruth disappearing.’

When Cathbad appeared in Nelson’s office (was it only yesterday?), he had had some actual information about Max to go with his sixth sense. Apparently Cathbad had been speaking to a fellow Druid who lives in Ireland. ‘He knew Max Grey from a long way back, when he lived in Ireland. He described him in detail. Only he called himself by a different name entirely. And Pendragon-’

‘Who?’ Nelson had asked, wincing as if in pain.

‘Pendragon. My friend. He said that this Max Grey character was a real troubled soul. Full of inner violence.’

Whilst admiring the Druid networking system, Nelson had, at the time, dismissed this as mere new age fancy. But now he says with real urgency in his voice, ‘Why do you think he’s involved?’

‘Today, when I couldn’t find Ruth, I rang him. No answer. I contacted his students. He hasn’t been seen all day.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘On a boat, apparently. Moored near Reedham.’

‘Come on then.’ Nelson reaches for his phone. ‘Let’s pay him a visit.’

Ruth screams, so loudly that it startles both of them. Roderick stops and looks at her quizzically.

‘Why are you frightened?’ he asks.

‘Why do you think?’ shouts Ruth. ‘I’m stuck here on a boat with a madman. A madman with a knife.’

Roderick looks quite hurt. ‘I’m not mad,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a first in classics from Cambridge.’

From what Ruth has seen of Oxbridge graduates, the two are not mutually exclusive. But she knows that her best hope is in getting Roderick to speak to her. She tries to make her voice calm and reasonable, as if she is having a cosy chat with another academic.

‘I did archaeology at UCL,’ she says. ‘They’ve got a good classics department.’

‘University College London,’ muses Roderick. ‘A very respectable university. You must be a clever girl.’

Ruth attempts a simper. ‘Are you a classicist?’ she asks, trying to sound suitably admiring.

‘I am a Roman.’ His eyes are glittering. Cataracts or madness? At least he sits down on a small stool opposite Ruth, and lowers the knife. ‘I realised that at an early age. I was born at the wrong time. I belong in the age of discipline and self-reliance, of sacrifice and the pure libation of blood. Of the old gods.’

The old gods. Ruth thinks of the body buried under the door, the head in the well, the black cockerel. She remembers the feeling that the house on Woolmarket Street belongs to an older, darker, time.

‘Of course,’ Sir Roderick is saying, ‘I don’t do much these days. I belong to the historical society and, of course, I’m a trustee of the museum.’

The museum. Alarm bells go off in Ruth’s head and in quick succession she sees the model baby, the two-headed calf and the black drapery that was thrown over her head. In the same moment, she recognises the smell, lemon and sandalwood. The scent that emanates discreetly from Sir Roderick Spens.