Elly Griffiths - The Janus Stone

It starts to rain as she climbs the grass bank; fine, warm rain that is refreshing rather than otherwise. The site is deserted, the trenches neatly covered with tarpaulins. There is no sign of Cathbad. Max had said that she would find the Janus Stone in the far trench. As she sets out across the uneven ground, the rain gets heavier and she wishes she had brought a coat. Lifting up the wet tarpaulin, Ruth sees the stone immediately. It is a round piece of what looks like granite, about twice the size of a human head. It looks misshapen and sinister lying there on the meticulously raked earth. Was it from a statue or did it have some other function? Even from where she stands she can see that both sides of the stone have a face, neither of them particularly friendly.

‘Janus,’ says a voice above her. ‘Janus. The guardian of the doorway.’

Judy hardly dares to breath. She knows it is vital that Sister Immaculata goes on speaking so she prays that no one else comes into the conservatory, that no well-meaning soul offers them tea or coffee, that the elderly nun doesn’t become too weak to continue.

‘Who killed her?’ she prompts gently.

But when Sister Immaculata turns to look at her, Judy sees that the old woman is no longer there. The eyes, full of anguish and brimming with tears, are the eyes of Orla McKinley.

‘I was only twenty-three,’ she says. ‘He called me his Jocasta. I was twenty when the baby was born. Too young. I didn’t know. I was only an ignorant girl from County Clare. He was so much cleverer. He knew all about history, about Ancient Rome. About the gods. About the terrible things you had to do to placate them.’

‘The baby,’ prompts Judy, a cold hand starting to close around her heart.

‘My baby,’ says Sister Immaculata, her face shining now with some remembered light. ‘My Bernadette.’

‘You had a baby?’

‘A little girl. I had her for three years. And then he killed her. He said the gods demanded it.’

The cold has now spread through Judy’s entire body. ‘Christopher Spens killed your baby?’ she whispers.

Sister Immaculata does not seem to hear. ‘He said that the gods needed a sacrifice. We had to make the walls safe again. Annabelle had died, he said, because the walls weren’t safe. We had to offer the gods something precious. That’s why he killed her, he said.’

‘So he killed your baby as a sacrifice ?’

‘It was his baby too,’ says Sister Immaculata sadly, ‘that didn’t seem to make a difference though.’

‘It was his baby too,’ echoes Judy.

‘I knew it was wrong.’ Sister Immaculata grasps Judy’s hand. ‘I knew it was wrong. A sin. And sin catches up with you, doesn’t it? That’s what the sisters used to say, back home in Ireland. Well, I sinned. With him. And I got pregnant and had the baby. Born in sorrow, that’s what they say. A bastard. Well, she paid the price, didn’t she? My Bernadette.’

‘How did he kill her?’ Judy knows she must get the whole story. She’ll have to come back and take a proper statement but somehow she knows that this chance might not come again. Sister Immaculata has kept her secret for over fifty years and now she is choosing to talk. She mustn’t stop now.

‘I was washing clothes in the laundry,’ says the nun wearily, ‘the maids had the morning off. When I went to check on her she was dead. Stabbed in her cot. There was blood over the walls, the covers, the floor – everywhere. He wanted me to put my hands in her blood. It was part of the ritual, he said.’

‘What did you do?’ asks Judy in horror.

‘I covered up for him,’ says Sister Immaculata sharply, ‘didn’t I tell you?’

‘How?’

‘I disappeared. He buried the body in the garden. Said he would dig her up later and put her under the door. An offering to Janus. The head would go in the well, he said. I left. I left that day, went back to Ireland. Everyone thought I’d taken Bernadette with me. That crazy unreliable Irish girl, they would have said. I did it to protect him.’

‘But why?’ Judy almost wails.

The nun looks at her with a curious expression, almost of pity, on her face. ‘I still loved him, you see. That was the worst thing. He’d killed my baby and I still loved him. I think now that was the biggest sin of all.’

‘So you went back to Ireland?’

‘I went back and I became a nun. What else can you do when you’ve committed a mortal sin? Then, years later, Father Hennessey came to the convent. He was looking for sisters to work in his children’s home. When he told me where it was, I knew. God had sent him. It was my chance to be near Bernadette again. I used to talk to her. At night. I used to walk in the grounds and talk to her. They were the happiest years of my life.’

‘Did Father Hennessey know?’

‘Oh no. He suspected. Not about Bernadette but he knew I had a secret. He tried to get me to tell him. The truth will set you free, he used to say. Free! I’ll never be free.’

As she says the last words, her head slumps forwards on her chest.

‘Sister Immaculata?’ Judy bends over the huddled figure. She is still breathing, harsh uneven breaths, but her eyes are closed.

Instantly the Sister is at their side.

‘You’d better go now,’ she says to Judy.

Outside, on the seafront, Judy takes great gulps of salty air. It is as if she can feel the nun’s painful struggle for breath inside her own lungs. She shakes her head, wanting to rid it of the image of the baby, the blood-soaked cradle, the terrified mother, the crazed father, the knife gleaming in his hand…

She forces herself to think logically, to switch off the horror film now running on a continuous loop in her brain (she can even smell the house – lavender polish and lilies and the sour undercurrent of blood). She is a police officer and she has a job to do. Judy shelters in the porch of one of the Gothic hotels to ring Nelson. It is raining and a sharp sea wind is blowing along the deserted promenade. Typical English summer weather.

He answers on the first ring and she tells the story as unemotionally as she can.

‘Jesus.’ She can hear Nelson’s sharp intake of breath and knows that he, too, is not unaffected. Not that he would ever show it, of course.

‘Christopher Spens got the nanny pregnant and then killed her baby as an offering to the gods?’

‘That’s what she said, sir.’

‘Do you believe her?’

‘Yes.’

Another pause and then Nelson says slowly, ‘That would explain why the body under the doorway shared DNA with Roderick Spens. They did share a common male ancestor – they both had the same father, Christopher Spens.’

‘Do you want me to come back, sir?’

‘No. Stay where you are. I’ll come up tomorrow and we’ll take a proper statement. She’s unwell, you say?’

‘She’s dying.’

‘We’d better be quick then,’ says Nelson callously. ‘You stay in Southport another night. Enjoy yourself.’

This last, thinks Judy, as she walks along the promenade in the rain, might prove a tough assignment.

Nelson puts down the phone. Judy’s story is almost unbelievable and yet he does believe it. As soon as he saw the little body, arranged so carefully amidst the stones and the rubble, he had known that something evil was afoot. Whether the child was Elizabeth Black, Annabelle Spens or Bernadette McKinley, something terrible had happened to that little girl and the memory of it still haunted that house, hung in the air around the swing and the wishing well, clung to the wallpaper, was imprinted in the black and white tiles. All traces of the house may now have vanished but Nelson knows one thing; he would not live in one of Edward Spens’ luxury apartments for a million pounds.