The Janus Stone

‘It’s possible. Tanya, how are you getting on with tracing Annabelle’s dental records?’

‘It’s difficult,’ says Tanya, rather defensively Nelson thinks. ‘I’ve been through all the dentists operating in Norwich in the forties and fifties. None of them are still practising and their records have vanished.’

‘Keep trying,’ says Nelson. ‘According to our expert there was some pretty fancy dental work done on that little girl.’

‘If the child is Annabelle Spens,’ says Judy slowly, ‘who could have killed her? It was a really brutal death, stabbed and then beheaded.’

‘I don’t know,’ says Nelson, ‘but I do know that in cases where a child has been murdered the killer is almost always one of the family.’

‘Christopher Spens?’

‘It’s possible. He sounds a nutcase to me. All that stuff about Latin. Roderick Spens said his father kept a shrine to the Roman Gods in his garden. The well too. That was built by him, to an authentic Roman design apparently.’

‘What about the mother?’ asks Tanya. ‘What was she like?’

‘Sir Roderick says she was “like an angel” but I get the impression that he didn’t really know her that well. Probably brought up by a nanny. The mother died quite young, in 1957.’

‘Only a few years after her daughter,’ says Judy, ‘probably died of grief.’

‘This isn’t a woman’s magazine,’ says Nelson, ‘she died of pneumonia. Quite common in those days.’

‘All the same,’ says Clough, ‘they were an unlucky family, weren’t they?’

Ruth is having trouble working. Having Judy in the house forced her to get up early, offer to make tea, etc. But Judy said that she would get something at the station. She left at eight, looking far more together than Ruth ever manages before ten a.m., or indeed ever.

It had been unexpectedly pleasant to have company last night. Max had left almost as soon as Judy arrived and that had been a bit of a relief too. She feels that she needs time to absorb Max’s story, to come to terms that Max Grey is, in fact, Martin Black. How could anyone go through all that and emerge the other side apparently normal and well-adjusted? If she had ever thought about Max’s childhood she would have imagined a middle-class home, public or maybe grammar school, a smooth transition to university, the usual relationships and friendships along the way. Never a children’s home, a dead sister, living rough, adopted by gypsies. Jesus – it’s like Wuthering Heights. And there is, she admits, something slightly Heathcliffy about Max.

Ruth sits down at her table by the window. It is a dull morning, the grey marsh merging seamlessly with the grey sky. She opens her computer but, after staring at her lectures notes for a minute, closes it again. She opens a drawer and gets out a beautiful clean piece of paper. One of the few things she and Nelson have in common is a liking for lists. At the top of her list Ruth writes: Woolmarket Street. Then she lists everyone she knows who is connected to the site.

Children’s Home

Father Hennessey

Max Grey (she stares at this name for a second before crossing it out and writing Martin Black)

Kevin Davies, undertaker

Other former residents

Staff (Max had mentioned a Sister James and she knows that Judy went to Southport to interview another nun)

Building Site

Edward Spens

Foreman and other building workers

Ted

Trace

She looks at the list for so long that Flint becomes bored and tries to sit on it. Ruth pushes him off. Anyone on the list could have put the two-headed calf on her doorstep, could have put the baby in the trench and written her name on the Roman wall. Of all the names, she has to face the fact that Max is the most likely. He knows about Roman ritual, he was the one who told her all that I, Claudius stuff in the first place; he has had the means and the opportunity. He was there when she found the writing on the wall. He was the one who found her in the trench after she had fainted. What if he had been there all along? What if he was the one who put the baby there (it was only the night before, after all, that she told him that she was pregnant)? As an archaeologist, he would have access to the museum; he could easily have got hold of the two-headed calf and the model baby too.

But why? Why would Max want to scare her, scare her to death, as he himself put it? To warn her away from the Woolmarket Street site? To prevent her from discovering his identity as Martin Black? Or is there some other mystery concerned with the old children’s home?

She looks at the list again. If the body under the door was killed over fifty years ago, there is only one person who was alive at the time. Father Patrick Hennessey. Well maybe there are still some nuns or other staff members alive but Father Hennessey is the only one she knows. If there is a secret, he will be the one who knows it. Don’t priests always know secrets? Isn’t that the whole point of the Catholic confessional?

When they met at the site, Father Hennessey had given her his card. At the time, she had thought it amusing that a priest would possess something as worldly as a business card. Father Patrick Hennessey SJ it says, in discreet grey capitals. She has no idea what SJ stands for and she doesn’t want to know. On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to meet him again and ask him a few questions of her own.

Her hand hovers by the phone.

Judy is sitting at her desk, fuming. Bastard! How dare he sneer at her. ‘This isn’t a woman’s magazine.’ And in front of Tanya Fuller too. Judy likes Tanya. She’s fun on a night out and she certainly provides a welcome antidote to Clough and the rest of the lads. But Judy also knows that Tanya is competition.

Judy has been in the police force for three years. She’s a graduate (something she doesn’t often mention to Nelson) and, as such, on the so-called ‘fast track’ to success. When, after eighteen months, she’d been given the transfer to CID she felt that she really was on the way up. She loves detective work and she gets on well with Nelson whose bark is definitely worse than his bite. He may sound like an unreconstructed male chauvinist but, in practice, he is fair to the women in his team and (unlike some DCIs) does not view them as useful only in cases of rape or domestic violence. But somehow Judy feels that her career has stalled. She is a Detective Constable, by now she should be a Detective Sergeant, like Clough. She knows that Nelson has the funding for another sergeant so why hasn’t he given her the stripes? At least until Tanya Fuller turned up she could be sure that she was the best candidate for the job. But now Tanya breezes in from another force with her intelligent questions and her eyes fixed adoringly on Nelson’s face. What if Nelson promotes Tanya over Judy? She couldn’t bear it. She’d jack it all in and become a bookie like her dad.

Judy is meant to be helping Tanya with the dentist search but instead she is going over the notes from the case. She is sure they are all missing something. And, if she spots it, that will mean one in the eye for Nelson, Tanya, all of them.

Idly she sketches a Spens family tree. She met Edward Spens once at a police do and found him rather attractive. This doesn’t affect her deep-seated belief that his family have something to hide.

She looks hard at the name Rosemary Spens. She hears Nelson’s voice, speaking in the flat tone he uses for briefings: ‘Sir Roderick says she was “like an angel” but I get the impression that he didn’t really know her that well. Probably brought up by a nanny.’ That’s it. Judy goes back to the file and rifles through until she comes to the census of 1951. She remembers Clough reading it out to them: ‘Christopher Spens, Rosemary Spens, children Roderick and Annabelle.’ But, typically, Clough has overlooked something and Nelson’s casual words have brought it back to her. There would have been other people in the house – servants, a cook and almost certainly a nanny. And,