The Janus Stone

by Elly Griffiths

  Ruth opens the door and fends off an ecstatic Flint. Shona bends down to stroke the cat. She has often looked after him when Ruth is away.

  ‘Hallo, darling, come to Auntie Shona. Ruth, I’m going to give up men and buy a cat.’

  Ruth has heard this many times before. ‘Cats aren’t so good at mending the Christmas lights. Or checking the oil in cars.’

  ‘No, but they’re better listeners.’ Shona cuddles Flint who stares hopefully at the floor.

  ‘True. And they don’t leave the loo seat up.’

  Shona sits on the sofa with her feet curled under her. She looks like someone preparing for a long, cosy chat. Ruth offers tea but Shona says she’d prefer a glass of wine. Ruth puts some crisps in a bowl and stuffs a handful in her mouth before bringing them through to the sitting room.

  ‘Phil says you’ve found a skeleton,’ says Shona.

  ‘Well, the field team found it. It’s on a building site in Norwich.’

  ‘The field team. Is that the mad Irishman?’

  ‘Ted. Yes. He’s not Irish though, is he? Why’s he called Irish Ted?’

  Shona’s eyes gleam. ‘It’s a long story. So, the body. Any signs of foul play?’

  Ruth hesitates, Shona is always interested in a good story. Maybe that’s what comes of being a literature expert. Ruth is less sure about her discretion. The last thing she wants is Shona telling everything to Phil in some steamy pillow-talk session. On the other hand, she badly wants to talk to someone.

  The head has been chopped off,’ she says.

  ‘No!’ Shona is agog. ‘Is it a ritual killing then?’

  Ruth looks curiously at Shona. Strange that this should be Shona’s first question. Or maybe not strange coming from someone so closely involved with Erik, that expert on ritual, sacrifice and bloodshed. She doesn’t think that most people would immediately connect a headless body with ritual.

  ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘The Romans sometimes made sacrifices to Janus, the God of doorways. This body is under a door.’

  ‘Is it Roman then?’

  ‘We won’t know until we’ve done the dating. It could be Roman or medieval but I don’t think so. The grave cut looked modern.’

  ‘Janus. Was he the guy with two faces?’

  ‘Yes. The God of beginnings and endings. January is named after him.’

  Shona shivers. ‘Sounds creepy. But, then again, a lot of men are two-faced.’

  ‘How’s Phil?’

  Shona smiles, rather sadly. ‘Pour us a glass of wine and I’ll tell you.’

  Ruth pours two glasses of wine and hopes that Shona won’t notice how slowly she drinks hers. Wine makes her feel sick these days. It’s almost as if her taste buds can separate the drink into its component parts: acidic grapes, fermenting alcohol, a hint of vine leaves. She can almost taste the peasants’ feet.

  Phil, it seems, has been showing his unpleasant face to Shona. He wants her to come away with him to a conference in Geneva but is insisting that they travel separately and that she pays her own fare. Ruth hides a smile. Phil’s stinginess is a standing joke in the department. Apparently he says he loves Shona but has taken to referring to his wife’s ‘fragility’, as if it will be Shona’s fault if anything happens to upset her.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind but she’s as strong as a horse. Looks like a horse too. An unattractive horse… Ruth, why aren’t you drinking?’

  Ruth looks guiltily at her glass. Shona has emptied hers but Ruth has only managed a few queasy sips.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Everyone seems to be asking her that, thinks Ruth. She suddenly feels a great urge to tell Shona about her pregnancy. People are going to have to know sometime. Cathbad has already guessed. Maybe everyone is talking behind her back. And she’ll need an ally when she tells Phil. She takes a deep breath.

  ‘Shona? I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘What?’ Shona is instantly alert, her eyes, with their long glittery lashes, fixed onto Ruth’s face.

  How to put it into words? ‘I’m expecting a baby’ sounds twee somehow. And she has a hard job thinking of the baby end of things. Better just be as factual as possible.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  Suddenly Ruth is scared of what she might see in Shona’s face. She knows that Shona has been pregnant twice and has had two abortions. Will she see envy, hatred, resentment? She forces herself to look at Shona and sees, to her amazement, that there are tears in her eyes.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Ruth repeats.

  Shona reaches over to touch Ruth’s arm. ‘Oh Ruth…’ she says tearfully. And then, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’m about thirteen weeks.’

  ‘Thirteen weeks. Oh my God.’ Shona wipes her eyes and seems to recover some of her equilibrium. Her expression is now straightforwardly curious. And she asks the question that Ruth dreads.

  ‘Who’s the father?’

  ‘I’d rather not say.’ This doesn’t go down any better with Shona than it did with Ruth’s parents. Shona flicks her hair impatiently.

  ‘Oh, come on, Ruth. You can tell me. Is it Peter’s?’

  ‘I can’t say.’ Now Ruth feels herself getting tearful. ‘Please.’

  Shona leans over to give her a proper hug. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just… gobsmacked. Are you keeping it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s brave,’ says Shona quietly.

  ‘Not really. I haven’t thought it through. The implications, I mean. But I do want it. Very much,’ she adds.

  ‘You’ll be a great mum! Can I be godmother?’

  ‘In a strictly non-religious sense, yes.’

  ‘I’ll be its auntie. Like I’m Flint’s auntie.’ There is a distinctly brittle edge to Shona’s laughter now.

  ‘It’ll need all the family it can get,’ says Ruth. ‘My parents have more or less disowned me.’

  ‘Really? Does that still happen? Everyone has babies now without being married. Even my mother wouldn’t mind. And she’s a mad Irish Catholic.’

  ‘My parents are… old-fashioned.’

  ‘They must be.’ Shona fiddles with her wine glass for a second before asking, ‘Does Phil know?’

  ‘No, not yet. I’ll have to tell him soon, before it becomes too obvious. I saw Cathbad today and he guessed immediately.’

  ‘Cathbad, really?’ Shona knows Cathbad of old. They met on the henge dig all those years ago. Ruth remembers that Shona initially sided with the Druids who wanted to keep the henge in place rather than with the archaeologists who wanted to move it to a museum. She wonders what Phil, an establishment man to the core, thinks about Shona’s newage leanings

  ‘Perhaps the spirits told him?’ suggests Shona.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Ruth remembers Cathbad saying that Max respected ‘the spirits’. She has a sudden vision of a shadowy army hovering around, questioning, commenting and passing judgement. Funnily enough, they all look a bit like her mother.

  ‘He’s having a party on Friday,’ she says.

  ‘A party?’

  ‘Well, a celebration. In honour of Imbolc, some Celtic thing about the coming of spring. He’s organising a party on the beach. Do you want to come?’

  Shona brightens up at the prospect of a party. ‘Why not? A spot of satanic ritual’s just what I need to cheer me up.’

  CHAPTER 12

  As it turns out, nothing could be less satanic than the Imbolc celebration on Saltmarsh beach. Some of Cathbad’s colleagues have even brought their children who play happily on the sand, daring each other to jump over waves. Even the vast bonfire, constructed out of driftwood and old packing cases, seems more like something made by the PTA to raise funds for playground equipment than an offering to the pagan gods of fire.

  Ruth and Max walk over the Saltmarsh, carrying offerings of wine and crisps. Though Max does not know it, they are following the path taken by Ruth and Lucy, that wild night in February, when the wind howled from the sea and the
marsh shifted treacherously in the darkness. Sometimes it seems to Ruth as if that night was something that happened to someone else; she can think about it quite calmly, as if she is reading about it in a book. At other times, the memory is as sharp as if it happened yesterday: the flight across the marshes in the night, the moment when she knew that she was going to die, the dark wave coming from nowhere.

  Now, though, the sky is palest blue and only a light, companionable breeze blows through the coarse grass. Ruth and Max take the path through the dunes and see the beach spread out before them; the silver line of the sea, the deep pools reflecting the evening sky, the miles upon miles of rippling sand.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ says Max. ‘I’d forgotten how open it is in Norfolk. Nothing but sand, sea and sky.’

  ‘Yes, it is beautiful,’ says Ruth, pleased that Max appreciates her beloved Saltmarsh. ‘It can be desolate in the winter but on evenings like this I think it’s the loveliest place on earth.’

  ‘I like the desolation too,’ says Max, looking out towards the retreating tide. The seagulls are swooping low over the waves and the shouts of the children seem thin on the evening air.

  Ruth looks at him curiously. She knows what he means. Sometimes the Saltmarsh’s sheer loneliness and splendour gives her a thrill of almost sexual pleasure. But she hadn’t expected Max to feel the same. Doesn’t he come from Brighton, where the beach is more about kiss-me-quick hats than desolate beauty? But he was brought up in Norfolk, she reminds herself.

  They walk towards the bonfire, very black against the white sand. Cathbad, wearing Druid’s robes and the purple cloak is supervising the stacking of wood but when he sees Ruth he breaks away with arms outstretched.

  ‘Ruth!’ They hug and Ruth feels Cathbad’s beard tickling her cheek.

  ‘Cathbad, this is my friend Max.’

  ‘Welcome!’ Cathbad gives Max a two-handed ‘vicar’s’ handshake. Indeed, in his white robes, he looks not unlike a priest greeting parishioners at the door of his church. Of course, Cathbad would say that this is just what the Saltmarsh is – a church, sacred ground. After all, man has worshipped here for hundreds, thousands, of years; first the Bronze Age people building their henge and then the Iron Agers who buried bodies and treasure at the point where the sea meets the land. It was one of these bodies that Ruth discovered last year.

  ‘Good to meet you,’ says Max. ‘This is a wonderful spot.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Cathbad, looking closely at Max. ‘This is a liminal zone, the bridge between life and death.’

  ‘Erik Anderssen 1998,’ says Max immediately. ‘I love that book. Anderssen was one of my heroes when I was a student.’

  Ruth can’t stop herself exclaiming. ‘Did you know Erik?’

  ‘I never met him but I’ve read almost everything he ever wrote. No one has ever understood prehistory better.’

  ‘He was a wonderful man,’ says Cathbad. ‘Ruth here was very close to him.’

  ‘Were you?’ Max turns to Ruth.

  ‘Well, I was his student,’ Ruth says guardedly. She still finds it hard to talk about Erik.

  ‘His favourite student,’ says Cathbad rather aggressively.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘I wish I’d met him,’ says Max lightly.

  ‘We’ve brought booze,’ says Ruth, wishing to turn the subject away from life and death.

  ‘Great,’ says Cathbad, ‘the gods need their libation. Freya over there is in charge of drinks.’

  Freya, a wispy blonde in blue robes, takes their bottles and stows them away carefully. She then offers them punch from a copper cauldron. Ruth sniffs suspiciously at her plastic cup as they walk away.

  ‘What’s in this?’ she asks. ‘Battery acid?’

  ‘Well, you did say that he works in the chemistry department.’

  ‘He used to be an archaeologist, you know.’

  ‘Is that how he knew Erik?’

  ‘Yes. Erik was his tutor at university. Then they met again on the henge dig. You know, the one I told you about? Cathbad was one of the Druids protesting about us moving the timbers.’

  ‘You can see their point,’ says Max slowly, looking out across the expanse of sand, perhaps imagining the henge in place, the circle of wooden posts stark against the sky. As for Ruth, the image is so clear that she is surprised it hasn’t materialised in front of her, complete with Erik kneeling in the centre, rhapsodising about the preservation of the wood.

  ‘Erik sympathised,’ she says, ‘but the sea was getting closer all the time. It would have destroyed the henge in the end.’

  Max smiles. ‘Destroyed or changed?’

  For a second, Ruth thinks about the Latin motto on the archway at Woolmarket Street: Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit, everything changes, nothing perishes, and she feels a sudden chill, as if a cold hand has touched her shoulder.

  ‘You are a fan of Erik’s,’ is all she says. Erik believed in the cycle of change, decay and rebirth. Has he been reborn? Sometimes it seems impossible that Erik’s vibrant spirit can really have died alongside his body. Surely there’s some blue-eyed baby somewhere that is Erik having a second go at life. Or some water spirit maybe, some animal – a seal or a sleek arctic fox.

  The bonfire is apparently completed. As the light fades Cathbad and the other Druids join hands and encircle it, chanting and singing. The children join in too, running in and out of the adults, laughing and excited. Max, Ruth and the other non-Druids stand nearby, torn between self-consciousness and interest. There is something magnificent about the spectacle, thinks Ruth, the tiny dark figures silhouetted against the sky, the towering bonfire and the faint crash of the waves in the background.

  Cathbad has some trouble lighting his symbolic firebrand. The wind keeps whipping out the flame and, eventually, Freya has to shield him with her cloak. But finally he raises aloft the burning brand. ‘Goddess Brigid, accept our offering!’

  Flames lick around the base of the bonfire. The children run around, shrieking with excitement. The adults are chanting again but then someone starts to play the guitar and the chanting turns into something cosier, something more like a folk song. There is quite a crowd now. Ruth recognises lots of faces from the university and from the field team, including Ted and Trace. Slightly to Ruth’s irritation, Max greets Trace enthusiastically. ‘She’s been working on the Swaffham site. She’s a good archaeologist. Very knowledgeable about the Romans.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Ruth’s appreciation of Trace’s skills is not improved by the fact that she is looking rather stunning in a black T-shirt and black leather trousers. ‘Let’s go and sit down somewhere,’ she says. Her back is killing her.

  They sit in the shelter of one of the dunes, eating vegetarian hot dogs. Max has managed to annex one of the better bottles of wine and Ruth is drinking orange juice. Max doesn’t comment on her abstemiousness. They talk about the two sites – the Roman excavation and the seventy-five luxury apartments – about the two decapitated bodies, about the Roman gods, particularly Janus, the two-faced God. ‘He’s also connected to the spring and the harvest,’ says Max. ‘He’s not just the god of doorways but of any time of transition and change, of progression from one condition to another.’

  ‘Is that because he can look backwards and forwards at the same time?’

  ‘Yes, it also helped him pursue women, the nymph Carna, for example.’

  ‘Did he catch her?’

  ‘Yes, and in return for her favours he gave her power over all door hinges.’

  Ruth laughs. ‘So, instead of WD40 we should pray to Carna?’

  ‘It’s worth a try.’

  Max pours more wine but Ruth has caught sight of a modern nymph, walking towards them across the sand. Shona, wearing a shawl and a flowing purple dress, accompanied by a very unwelcome acolyte – Phil.

  ‘Ruth! What are you doing skulking here?’

  Skulking, thinks Ruth, getting to her feet, is really a very unattractive way of putting it. She had been feel
ing rather good, lounging on the sand beside a good-looking and intelligent man. Now she feels foolish and somehow rather disreputable.

  ‘Hallo, Ruth,’ says Phil, too loudly. This is the first time Ruth has seen him in Shona’s company. This evening must represent some sort of ‘coming out’ as a couple. No wonder Shona looks so triumphant.

  ‘Hallo, Phil,’ says Ruth warily. ‘You remember Max Grey from Sussex? He’s the archaeologist in charge of the Swaffham dig.’

  ‘Yes, of course. How are you? Glad Ruth’s looking after you.’

  This remark, like Shona’s, serves to make the whole evening seem ridiculous. Who is Phil to say that Ruth is ‘looking after’ Max? Why does he need looking after, anyhow?

  ‘I’m having a wonderful time,’ says Max, making things slightly better.

  ‘I’ve got no time for all this hippie nonsense,’ says Phil, ‘but Malone is a friend of Shona’s.’

  ‘Malone?’

  ‘Catweasel or whatever he calls himself.’

  ‘Cathbad,’ says Ruth between gritted teeth.

  ‘I hear he’s an ex-archaeologist,’ says Max.

  ‘Years ago,’ says Phil dismissively. ‘He works as a lab assistant now. He’s one of the airy-fairy type, believes in the symbolic landscape, ley lines, spirits of the ancestors, all that crap.’

  Max says nothing. Ruth is pretty sure that he too believes in some of these things but it is in his interests to stay on the right side of Phil, who is partly funding the Roman dig.

  It is nearly dark now. The Druids have planted burning torches in the sand and now the capering figures around the bonfire look monstrous and misshapen, their shadows black against the flames. The scent of wood smoke fills the air with acrid sweetness. Ruth realises that she is suddenly very tired. More than anything she wants to be home, in bed, with Flint flexing his claws against the duvet. But she is sure that Max won’t want to leave yet. How many more hours will she have to spend watching Cathbad throwing symbolic objects onto the fire? The last one was a University of North Norfolk sweatshirt; she dreads to think what this signifies.