‘I’ve got no idea. Dad! Let me go! What are you playing at?’
‘We’re going home.’
‘I don’t want to go home. I’m playing Tzeitel.’
‘Come on.’
Without letting go of Rebecca’s arm, he shouts ‘Sorry’ to the now frankly terrified teacher and propels them both out of the room.
In the corridor, he stabs Laura’s number into his phone. Straight through to answerphone. He tries again, hardly noticing the four missed calls from Judy Johnson. He looks at his watch. Four o’clock. Michelle won’t be home before six. Where is Laura? His darling eldest daughter, so correct and well-behaved always (like one of the girls in Little Women, Michelle used to say). Where can she be?
‘Does Laura go to any clubs on a Thursday?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Keep ringing her,’ Nelson thrusts his phone into Rebecca’s hand, ‘we’re going home.’
Ignoring Rebecca’s litany of complaints, threats and slurs on his parenting (he’s had plenty of practice), Nelson drags her back through the school and across the now deserted playing field to the place where his car is rammed up against the wall.
‘Dad! Your car!’ For the first time, Rebecca sounds shocked.
‘Keep phoning.’
Laura will have gone home. It’s not unlike her to get home first, put the kettle on and cook supper for everyone. An angel, that’s what she is. Nelson’s eyes are wet when he thinks what an angel his eldest daughter is. Rebecca has always been the rebellious one and, besides, Rebecca is sitting beside him, safe and sound, so he doesn’t need to sanctify her. But Laura, Laura is out there somewhere with a madman on her trail. Perhaps he has already found her, perhaps he has… Nelson rams his foot down on the accelerator.
‘Dad! Are you trying to kill us?’
‘Keep phoning.’
He takes the turn into the drive on two wheels. Michelle’s car isn’t there but then he wouldn’t expect her to be home yet. Will she kill him for not phoning her first? No, Michelle would want him to do what he is doing – save their daughters’ lives.
‘Laura!’ yells Nelson, bursting in through the front door.
A silence during which Nelson thinks that he can hear his heart breaking. And then, a faint noise, like a rat scrabbling, directly overhead.
‘Laura?’ Nelson starts to climb the stairs.
‘Dad! Don’t!’ Rebecca grabs his arm. He looks at her, uncomprehending. He tries to shake Rebecca off and, as he does so, notices two things: Laura’s flowery backpack lying beside the front door and a pair of man-size trainers next to it.
‘Dad?’
And there is Laura at the top of the stairs. Not dead but gloriously alive, wearing a dressing gown tightly belted around her waist.
‘Laura! Sweetheart!’ He bounds upstairs to hug her. She’s safe. Thank God, she’s safe. Thank you God. I’ll go to mass next Sunday. She’s alive. They’re both alive… A dressing gown?
He loosens his grip, takes in Laura’s dishevelled appearance, Rebecca’s attempts to make herself invisible, the scuffling sounds still emanating from one of the upstairs rooms. Quick as thought, he kicks open the door to Laura’s bedroom.
And finds a youth, half-dressed, trying to climb out of the window.
CHAPTER 31
It takes about a second for Nelson to revert from distraught father to aggressive policeman. He slams the window shut and addresses the cringing boy, ‘Get your clothes on, sunshine, and get out of my house. If I ever see you here again, I’ll lock you up.’
At the foot of the stairs, Rebecca and Laura are staring up at him, clinging together for support.
‘Did you know?’ he asks Rebecca. ‘Did you know what she was doing?’
‘No. Honestly!’
He knows she is lying but there is no time to do anything about that now. He is already phoning Sergeant Clough. ‘Cloughie. Someone’s threatening my girls. I need some protection over here right now.’ Glancing at his phone, he sees there are now six missed calls from Judy.
‘Get in the sitting room,’ he tells the girls.
‘I want to get dressed,’ says Laura.
Nelson experiences a spasm of – what? Revulsion, anger, sadness? His daughter, his angel, was about to have sex with that gangling idiot upstairs. He hears the front door slam. At least he is gone, maybe he won’t come back. Maybe he was just in time to save his daughter’s virginity. And then he thinks: who am I kidding? Of course he wasn’t in time; he is months, perhaps years, too late.
‘Who was he?’ he asks.
‘His name’s Lee,’ says Laura sulkily. ‘Mum’s met him,’ she adds, as if this makes it all right.
A fresh horror strikes Nelson’s heart. ‘Does your mother know…?’
‘No!’ Laura’s shocked response somehow reassures him. At least Laura has had the decency to hide her sex life from her parents. At least Michelle isn’t colluding with her daughters behind his back.
‘I want you both to stay downstairs,’ he says.
It is gradually beginning to dawn on Rebecca that there is more to her father’s behaviour than the usual parental paranoia.
‘Dad,’ she says, ‘what’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ Nelson starts to dial Judy’s number.
‘You said someone was threatening us.’
‘Just some nutter,’ says Nelson, trying to sound reassuring. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, I promise you.’
Both the girls now look completely terrified. They huddle together on the sofa and Rebecca automatically switches on the TV. Nelson is about to shout at her to turn it off but then he thinks that maybe they could do with the soothing mindlessness of MTV or Hollyoaks. Certainly, Laura and Rebecca both relax slightly when the screen is filled with loud Americans exchanging complicated handshakes.
Then the doorbell rings and they both scream.
‘It’s only Cloughie,’ says Nelson. ‘Stay here!’ he barks, slightly ruining the calming effect.
But it isn’t Clough. It’s Cathbad. He is wearing what Nelson calls his ‘semi-Druid’ costume; jeans and T-shirt covered by a tattered purple cloak. But his expression as he grasps Nelson’s arm is devoid of any play-acting. He looks in deadly earnest.
‘Nelson. I think something’s happened to Ruth.’
Judy presses ‘redial’ again and again as she runs through the rainswept Southport streets. Why the hell isn’t Nelson answering his phone? Passing pensioners and glum-looking tourists turn to stare as she races past them. Probably no one has moved that fast in Southport for the last fifty years. When she arrives at the convent, she is wild-haired and out of breath, still punching redial with one finger.
‘Can… I… see… Sister Immaculata please?’
‘I’m sorry, it’s out of the question.’ The nun at the door looks faintly accusing. ‘She’s had a very bad turn. The doctor’s with her now.’
‘I’ll wait,’ pants Judy.
‘She won’t be seeing anyone else today.’
At first Nelson hardly takes in what Cathbad is saying. Then, slowly, the wheels turn in his head and his whole body is suddenly icy cold. Ruth… his daughter. I’m going to kill your daughter. Could whoever sent this message possibly know that Ruth is carrying his daughter inside her? He goes so pale that Cathbad looks concerned.
‘Are you all right?’
‘What’s happened to Ruth?’
‘We were meant to meet at the Swaffham site. But when I got there there was no sign of her. And I found this in one of the trenches.’
He holds out Ruth’s phone.
‘You’d better come in,’ says Nelson.
The girls hardly look up as the cloaked figure passes through the sitting room. They are deeply involved in some rubbish involving American high school pupils, loud rock music and vampires. Nelson and Cathbad talk in the kitchen, amongst Michelle’s gleaming work surfaces and the cork-board groaning with invitations, shopping lists and school timetables. It seems almost impossibl
e that evil should come here, into this sunny family room, but they both know that it has; they both feel its shadow.
‘I went to her cottage,’ Cathbad is saying. ‘It’s completely deserted.’
‘The university?’
‘No one there. Her office is locked.’
Nelson picks up Ruth’s phone. His was the last number she dialled. He looks at his own phone, six missed calls from Judy Johnson and, before that, one from Ruth Galloway.
It is a shock when his phone rings again. Judy Johnson.
‘Johnson. What is it?’
‘Roderick Spens sir. I think he was the father.’
‘What?’
‘Sister Immaculata. I thought the baby was Sir Christopher’s but now I think it was Roderick’s. He would have been about fourteen or fifteen when it was conceived. Sister Immaculata, Orla, would have been twenty.’
‘She had an affair with a fourteen-year-old?’
‘I think so. Sister Immaculata said he called her his Jocasta. Jocasta was the mother of Oedipus.’
‘Classical scholar, are you now?’
‘I looked it up.’
‘Have you confronted this Sister Immaculata?’
‘She’s too ill to speak to me.’
Nelson remembers Dr Patel saying that Sir Roderick’s mind was ‘remarkably sharp’. He remembers that, when Ruth texted to say that she was expecting a girl and he had rung her back, Sir Roderick had actually been in his office, dithering about and pretending to be a sweet little old man.
‘Are you still there, sir?’
‘Yes. Good work, Judy. Keep trying to see the nun. I’ll call you later.’
He clicks off the phone. Cathbad leans forward and Nelson sees not the fey Druid but the scientist, the man who would, incredibly enough, have made rather a good policeman.
‘Nelson,’ he says. ‘I think Max Grey has kidnapped Ruth.’
30th June Day of Aestas
I hadn’t expected this. Socrates may favour dialogue but I don’t. The last thing I needed was a chat with the infant. Apart from anything else, my time was limited. The maids would be back at midday and the mother could come in at any moment.
Then I had a brainwave. ‘Keep quiet,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’
I bent over the bed. I had hoped she was asleep but she wasn’t. Her eyes were open and she looked at me.
She obeyed my order, even putting her finger to her lips. I’m obviously born to command. In fact, I think I’ve got quite a gift with children.
‘Lie still,’ I said. And I pulled the knife out of my pocket.
I raised the knife. She laughed. Sacrilege! I lowered the knife slightly and looked at her. Then she started to cry.
CHAPTER 32
When Ruth opens her eyes it is still dark. She is not scared at first. Instead she feels rather sleepy, soothing memories rocking to and fro in her head: picnicking with her mother and brother in Castle Wood, listening to the radio with her dad, floating in the sea, hair streaming back amongst the seaweed, sleeping on a beach in the sun. Even when she realises that she is, in fact, lying tied up on a narrow bed, she is not immediately filled with terror. The pleasant memories persist along with the gentle rocking motion. Then, as if in an effort to rouse her, the baby in her womb kicks. Ruth is suddenly wide awake, struggling to sit upright. Her hands are tied behind her back so this is a difficult feat, but she manages it. By her head there is a small round window but through it she can see only grey and green, merging and separating like colours in a kaleidoscope. The whole thing is so horribly like a dream that she actually closes her eyes again and wills herself to wake up. But when she opens her eyes it is all still there, the rope (now digging painfully into her wrists), the window onto nothingness, the strange seesawing movement.
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 as
ks, 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.
‘My father was a great classicist,’ Roderick goes on, ‘Christopher Spens. Have you heard of him?’
Something tells Ruth that she had better say yes.
‘He was a great man. A great headmaster. Wrote many books about Ancient Rome. But he never got the recognition he deserved. He died a broken man. Never got over my sister’s death.’
‘Your sister died?’ Ruth remembers Nelson saying something about Annabelle Spens. Could Roderick’s sister be the child buried under the door?
‘Of scarlet fever, yes. Nothing was ever right again. My mother stayed in her room all day crying. My father spent every hour at the school, never seemed to want to come home. He knew the house was cursed, you see. That’s why I had to kill the other baby, you see. To lift the curse.’
Ruth’s whole body is suddenly stone cold. ‘What baby?’ she whispers.
‘My baby,’ says Roderick carelessly. ‘I lay with one of the servants. An ignorant Irish girl but comely enough.’ His voice thickens.
The Janus Stone Page 22
