Elly Griffiths - The Janus Stone

A dark shape is beside by her car. A man.

Ruth screams.

‘Ruth? It’s OK. It’s me.’ It is Max Grey.

Ruth hears someone still screaming and realises, to her embarrassment, that it is her. ‘Max,’ she gasps. He is by her side, putting an arm round her. He smells of wood-smoke and soap. ‘Ruth? What is it?’

‘Someone… someone up at the site… my name… on a wall…’

‘What?’

Ruth takes a deep breath, holding on to Max’s arm to steady herself. ‘I was up at the site… having a look. I saw someone had written… written my name on a wall. Then I thought someone was there, watching me. I heard them breathing. Silly, I know.’

She can’t see Max’s face in the darkness but she feels his arm stiffen. His voice when it comes, though, is calm and reassuring. ‘Why don’t I go up and have a look? You stay here. Sit in your car, put the heater on. You’re shivering. Hang on.’

He turns away and Ruth sees now that the Range Rover is parked beside her Renault. He comes back with a thick jumper and a flask. ‘Here, put this on.’ She puts on the jumper, it smells comfortingly of musty wool. She opens her car door and climbs inside. Max hands the flask in after her. ‘Have a swig. I’ll be right back.’

Ruth takes a tentative sip. Black coffee. All drinks taste odd at the moment but this is something different. After a second, she realises it has whisky in it.

Max is back after a few minutes. He leans in through the window.

‘Are you OK to drive home? I’ll follow you.’

For the first time Ruth is relieved to see the security light come on as she opens her gate. Right now, she wants as much light as she can get. She opens the front door, hoping her sitting room is not too untidy.

Max Grey, though, does not seem to notice the papers all over the floor or even the dirty washing on the sofa. He strokes Flint, admires her books and her collection of arrowheads and accepts the offer of tea with every appearance of pleasure. It is only when they’re sitting down with their tea (the washing hastily stowed away in the kitchen) that they talk about the events on the site.

‘Was anyone there when you first arrived?’ asks Max.

‘No. It was completely deserted. Phil wanted me to get some soil samples, and I just thought I’d have a look at the trenches – you’ve done loads of work – and then I saw those… those words.’

‘You said you thought you heard someone…’

‘Yes, I heard noises very near me… someone breathing. I don’t know. I could have imagined it. Did you see anyone?’

Max is silent for a second and then he says, ‘I saw a shape, maybe a dog or even a large fox. Nothing else.’

‘A dog.’ Ruth is so relieved that she laughs. ‘That explains the panting then.’

‘Yes.’ But Max doesn’t smile back. He frowns down into his cup.

‘Have you any idea who could have done this?’ asks Ruth. ‘I mean none of your students knows me from Adam. And to go to the trouble of sneaking up to the site with a pot of red paint-’

Max looks up. ‘I don’t think it was paint.’

‘What-’ It takes a few seconds for Ruth to realise what he means and then a few more for her to be able to frame the word. ‘Blood?’

Max nods, ‘I think so, yes. We can check tomorrow.’

‘But why…’ Ruth’s voice is rising, ‘why would anyone write my name on a wall in blood ?’

‘I don’t know,’ Max says again. Then, ‘Ruth, have you ever read I, Claudius ?’

Surprised Ruth says, ‘Yes, I think so. A long time ago. It’s by Robert Graves, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. You’re too young to remember but there was a terrific TV series years ago. Derek Jacobi and Siân Phillips.’

In fact Ruth does remember though she is flattered that Max thinks she is too young. The programme was past her bedtime but she remembers the opening credits: a snake gliding slowly over a Roman mosaic. Her parents used to say that it was disgusting (‘a waste of our licence fee. I’m going to write to Mary Whitehouse’) but Ruth had a strong suspicion that they used to watch it after she had gone to bed.

‘What about it?’ she asks.

Max sighs. ‘In the book, the child Caligula kills his father, Claudius’s brother Germanicus. He does it by, quite literally, scaring him to death.’

Ruth is silent, thinking of the snake moving across the floor. This whole thing has suddenly taken on a surreal tinge, as if she is acting in her own TV drama, quite unreal, the disturbing images existing only to shock the more sensitive viewers.

‘He did it,’ says Max, ‘by exploiting Germanicus’s superstitions. He stole his lucky talisman, a green jade figure of Hecate. He left animal corpses around the house, cocks’ feathers smeared in blood, unlucky signs and numbers written on the walls, sometimes high up, sometimes,’ he looks at Ruth, ‘sometimes very low down, as if a dwarf had written them. Then Germanicus’s name appeared on the wall, upside down. Each day, one of the letters disappeared. On the day that only a single G remained, Germanicus died.’

There is a silence. Flint jumps on the sofa, purring loudly. Ruth buries her hand in his soft amber fur.

‘Do you really think,’ she says at last, ‘that someone is trying to scare me, by using an idea they found in I, Claudius ?’

Max shrugs. ‘I don’t know but it was the first thing that came to my head. And when you think about the dead cockerel…’

‘So we’re looking for a deranged Robert Graves fan?’

Max laughs. ‘Or someone addicted to classic TV. I don’t know, Ruth. What does seem clear is that someone is trying to scare you.’

‘To warn me off the Norwich site?’

‘Possibly. It’s no secret that you’re involved. You had quite a high profile in that other case, didn’t you? The Lucy Downey case.’

Ruth is silent. She had tried to keep as low a profile as possible (only Nelson knew, for example, that it was she, not the police, who had found Lucy) but she supposes that things always leak out. In any case, it would not be hard to work out that she, as head of Forensic Archaeology, would be involved in both cases.

‘They’ll have to work harder than that to scare me,’ she says at last.

Max smiles. ‘Good for you.’ There is another silence, a rather different one this time. Then he says, almost shyly, ‘Ruth. Will you have dinner with me? One day next week. Not at the Phoenix. Somewhere nicer.’

Ruth looks at him, sitting at ease on her sagging armchair, his long legs folded under him. Beside her, Flint’s purrs increase. She shouldn’t say yes. She is a pregnant woman. She doesn’t need this sort of complication. Max smiles at her. She notices, for the first time, that one of his front teeth is slightly chipped.

‘All right,’ she says, ‘I’d like to.’

When he has gone, Ruth is so tired that she goes straight to bed without even checking that Flint has enough food for the night (he wakes her up later to remind her about this). Lying on her bed, she can still hear Max’s Range Rover driving slowly along the narrow road. Ten minutes later, her security light comes on again. But Ruth does not get up.

19th June Festival for Minerva

I must get organised. I must not act ex abrupto. So – I have my knife which is honed now to a serviceable edge. I have the axe which will do later for the head. I have been wondering if I need some form of anaesthetic, to prevent the child from crying out. The difficulty is to obtain such things. The dentist might help, he is an intelligent man, at the cutting edge of science. I could easily explain my need for chloroform as a wish to carry out a scientific experiment at school.