‘Don’t hold it by the eye sockets!’ squeaks Ruth, kneeling beside Nelson. ‘They’re very fragile.’
‘I’m coming back up.’
The diver appears a minute later, carrying a skull carefully on the flat of his hand. He looks like an actor playing Hamlet in an experimental production (Shakespeare Meets Beckett perhaps?). Ruth takes the small skull in both her hands.
‘Well?’ says Nelson.
‘It’s a child’s,’ says Ruth quietly.
‘There’s something else down there, sir.’
‘Well, don’t hang about here chatting. Back you go.’
This time the diver emerges with what is clearly an animal skull.
‘The cat?’ asks Ted, leaning over Ruth’s shoulder.
‘Could be.’ Briefly, Ruth thinks of Hecate and wonders about the colour of the cat found buried under the outer wall. The goddess of witchcraft. Hecate the child-nurse.
They all stare at the two skulls, side by side on the tarpaulin. Ruth is thinking about head cults, about St Fremund washing his severed head in a well, about children’s bodies buried under the walls of temples. Nelson is thinking about Martin and Elizabeth Black. Did they never, in fact, run away? Does this skull belong to one of the missing children, murdered within the very grounds of the children’s home?
Ted breaks the silence. ‘Will the coroner want these?’
‘The human skull will go to the post-mortem, yes. I’ll take the animal skull back to the lab.’ Nelson watches as Ruth bags and labels the two skulls. The human skull is then placed in a special container marked, rather grimly, ‘Police Pathology’. This she hands to Nelson.
‘Will you be at the post-mortem?’ she asks.
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
‘I’ll see you there then.’
‘I’ll walk you to your car.’
Watched curiously by the others, they walk back through the grounds to where Ruth’s car is parked on the drive, under the shadow of the oak tree. The Druid’s tree, St Bridget’s tree, looks green and innocuous in the midday sun. Ruth opens her car boot and carefully places the box containing the cat’s skull inside. Nelson walks around the dusty Renault, kicking a loose hubcap into place.
‘How long will it take you to do your tests?’ he asks.
‘A few hours. Samples from the post-mortem will take longer.’
He makes his characteristic horse-pawing-the-ground movement. Nelson, Ruth knows, hates waiting for anything. But, then, still looking at the ground, he says, ‘I heard from Cathbad the other day.’
Ruth is instantly alert. ‘What did he want?’
‘Oh, to invite me to a lunatic beach party to celebrate some pagan feast day.’
‘And you didn’t go?’
‘No, I didn’t think it was my sort of thing somehow. Or Michelle’s.’ He looks at her.
Ruth turns away on the pretext of closing the boot. ‘You were probably right.’
‘Did you go?’
‘Yes.’
‘On your own?’
Ruth stares. She can’t believe he has asked this. ‘No,’ she says at last, ‘with a friend. Max Grey.’
‘Have a good time?’
‘OK. There was a bonfire, lots of chanting, horrible food. You know the sort of thing.’
Nelson grins suddenly. ‘Sounds like a Masonic meeting.’
‘Are you a Mason then?’
‘No, Cloughie is though.’
For a second they look at each other in silence and then Nelson says, with what sounds like fake heartiness, ‘Well, mustn’t stand here all day gossiping. See you at the postmortem.’
With this cheery salutation he heads off at top speed, almost colliding with Ted and the diver who are clearly off to the pub.
Ruth takes the animal skull back to the lab. The science block is deserted. There is an end-of-term party going on in the grounds, complete with beer tent and live bands. Ruth can hear the bass notes, like a giant heartbeat, and the occasional roar of beery applause. But the lecture rooms and laboratories are silent. No sign of Cathbad or any of the other lab technicians. Cathbad is probably at the party – he enjoys any kind of celebration, pagan or otherwise.
Watched by a poster showing diseases of the eye and by sundry silent bones in glass cases, Ruth gets out the skull and starts to clean it with a soft brush. Going by the shape and size, she is almost certain that it is a cat. The blunt edges of the neck bones show that the head has been removed roughly, probably by an axe. Looking at the cut marks under a microscope Ruth concludes that the head was removed after death. The marks clearly point to cutting from the front. If the animal was still alive this would cause massive bleeding as it would mean sawing through the jugular. It is more likely that the cat was killed first and beheaded later.
Why? She has a million theories, none of them very likely. In so-called Celtic ‘head cults’ the head was often removed for religious or magical rituals. Placing the heads in the well certainly seems like a ritual act. Are the skulls Celtic then? She doesn’t think so somehow.
It is growing darker outside and the party is getting more and more raucous. She can hear doors slamming as students run along corridors looking for deserted rooms where they can have sex or take drugs. Just as long as they don’t come in here. The blue ‘sterile conditions’ light is on outside. That should deter them. She doesn’t imagine that any of them are feeling particularly sterile.
Ruth’s back is aching so she takes off her gloves and sits down to drink a glass of water. Looking at the little skull on the examination table, she suddenly feels unaccountably sad. She knows that the dead child is more important than the cat. The cat is simply a clue, an oddity, a slightly macabre detail. But even so, as she looks down on the thin little bones, Ruth feels a surge of pity. She lost her beloved cat, Sparky, earlier in the year and she still misses her. Probably this cat too was loved by someone. She sends a message back in time. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the things that humans do to animals.’ She is aware that, in this very university, animals are experimented on every day (once or twice a year there are demonstrations from animal rights protesters and security is tightened) but, by and large, she accepts this as being necessary for the common good. But this – this is different.
Was the cat a sacrifice? Was it practice? Kill an animal first, work up to the ultimate horror of killing a child? What did Max say? ‘It was traditional to sacrifice black animals to Hecate.’
On impulse Ruth goes over to the box containing the other evidence bags from the site. Bags of soil and vegetation for analysis, fragments of brick and stone and, yes, there it is… She gets out the plastic bag containing the Roman signet ring. Carefully she tips the ring onto her hand. A handwritten label says ‘Bronze ring with intaglio, probably Roman.’ The device is hard to see, three slightly overlapping rings. ‘Looks like a shamrock,’ Irish Ted had suggested, appropriately enough. But now, looking at it under the microscope, Ruth can see that the three circles are actually three heads.
Hecate. The three-headed goddess.
