Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“How did they find you?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “And classified.”

“So, are you a cop? A real one?”

“I am,” he said. “I was trained. The uniform is real. The car was issued to me.”

There was a jingle of keys in the door, and Callum entered, wearing a London Tube uniform.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “I got your message.”

“There’s been an accident,” Stephen said.

“What sort of accident?”

“Boo—”

“Boo got hit by a car,” I said. “The Ripper came after me. Boo tried to help, and he threw her in front of a car.”

For a moment, Callum couldn’t speak. He leaned against the counter and put his hand to his forehead.

“Is she—”

“She’s hurt,” Stephen said, “but she’s alive. I had to get Rory away from the scene.”

“Alive? Conscious alive? How alive?”

“She wasn’t conscious at the scene,” Stephen said.

Callum just stared at me.

“It’s not her fault,” Stephen said.

“I know that,” Callum replied, but he wasn’t acting like he knew that. “Please tell me she got him. Please tell me that. Please let that be the upshot of all this . . .”

“It sounds like she tried,” Stephen said. “But no.”

“It was a mistake to send her in alone,” Callum snapped. “I told you it was a mistake. I told you we should have just stayed at the school.”

“We needed to investigate—”

“Investigate what? What exactly have we come up with so far?”

“He spoke to Rory,” Stephen said, his voice rising. “We learned a few things. We learned he had the sight when he was alive. That’s probably why he’s been trailing Rory. That’s probably why he killed at Wexford. He found someone who could see him, who could hear him.”

“Oh, good,” Callum said. “Well, then. Sounds like we’ve solved it.”

“Callum!” Stephen’s voice went deep when he yelled. I could feel the sonic boom in my stomach. “You aren’t helping. So either stop it now or go outside and walk it off.”

For a moment, I thought they were going to have a fight—a real, physical one. Callum stood up, straightened, and stormed out of the room. I heard a door slam somewhere else in the apartment.

“Sorry,” Stephen said quietly. “He’ll calm down in a moment.”

I could hear things being thrown around in the other room. Then the door opened again and Callum joined us, rattling the table and spilling our tea with the force of sitting down.

“So what do we know?” he asked.

“Someone is clearing up the red tape. He’ll tell me when it’s all right for me to take Rory back to Wexford. Until then, we should stay here with her.”

“We should be out there, dealing with him.”

“I’d like that too,” Stephen said, “but we have no idea where he’s gone. But in the meantime, we can work with what he’s said this evening. He’s been communicating.”

Stephen quickly brought Callum up to speed on the various messages while I drank some tea and kept my head down. I was a little frightened of both of them at the moment. Boo was hurt because of me.

“There was something written on a wall after one of the Ripper killings in 1888,” Stephen said. “After the fourth murder—a bit of anti-Semitic graffiti. Most people think it was a false lead, that it wasn’t written by the Ripper at all—or if it was, it was probably written to lead the police down the wrong path. This message feels wrong . . .”

“Maybe he just wanted to turn up at that Rippercon thing,” Callum said. “Do a signing for the fans.”

“Possibly,” Stephen said. “Everything he’s done so far has been about attracting an audience. The very act of imitating Jack the Ripper is an attempt to get attention and cause fear. He commits murders in full view of CCTV cameras. He sent a message to the BBC to be read aloud on television. Tonight, he pulled Rory aside. And then he wrote a message right in front of half the world’s press, directing us to a phrase from the Bible. It’s all been very, very specific and theatrical.”

“But everyone’s going to think this Richard Eakles guy wrote that,” Callum said. “Apart from us, no one’s going to believe his story that an invisible man knocked him aside to write some weird, possibly Bible-related message. At least the one about Rory was clear.”

“What one about Rory ?” I said.

Callum backed away from the table a little and played with the edge of the plastic tablecloth. Stephen exhaled long and slow.

“There’s one part of this we haven’t mentioned,” Stephen said, staring at Callum. “We didn’t want you to be unduly alarmed. It’s all under control—”

“What message about Rory?” I said again.

“The James Goode letter,” he said. “There was one final sentence that confirmed in our minds that what you had seen was real. It wasn’t read on the air. It said . . . I look forward to visiting the one with the sight to know me and plucking out her eyes .”

Both of them remained silent while I took this in. I stared into the depths of the teacup. I was from Louisiana. Bénouville, Louisiana. Not from here. I was from the land of hot weather and storms and big box stores, of freaks and crawfish and unstable McMansions. Home. I needed home.

“You are the only lead,” Stephen said. “Every other avenue has been tried. The paper and the package that was sent to the BBC . . . analyzed over and over. Paper and box and wrapping from Ryman’s stationers—one of thousands they sell every year. Not particularly helpful, as he obviously didn’t buy it—an invisible man can’t walk into a shop and buy a box—so we couldn’t trace it at the point of sale. CCTV turned up nothing, as is now well-known. No physical evidence at any crime scene to tie back to the killer—again, obvious to us, baffling to the lab. We only had you. From you, we at least knew he wasn’t the original Jack the Ripper, because of his appearance . . .”

I think he saw that none of this was helping, so he shut up.

“The plan is simple,” he said. “You stay at Wexford, and we stay near you. Very near you. If he comes anywhere near you—”

“He came near me tonight,” I said.

“So we double our protection,” Stephen said. “It won’t happen again. But now you know, and you have to listen to us, and you have to trust us.”

“What can you do?” I said, my voice shaking. “If he comes near me, what can you do about it?”

Callum opened his mouth to speak, but Stephen shook his head.

“We take care of it,” Stephen said. “The details are covered under the Official Secrets Act. You can be angry. You can be upset. You can be whatever you want. But the truth is, we’re the only people who can keep you safe. And we will keep you safe. It’s not only our job, but now he’s hurt our friend, and that happens to bother us quite a lot.”

“I could go home,” I said.

“Running away won’t help. Going home probably wouldn’t even deter him, if he’s serious. The ghosts we’ve encountered operate basically in the same manner as humans in terms of general locomotion. While most tend to haunt one place, there are plenty that have much larger territories. The Ripper seems comfortable moving around the East End. There’s no reason I can think of that he wouldn’t be able to travel.”

He didn’t sugarcoat it. The bluntness was oddly calming.

“So you stay where we can do something about it,” he went on. “And you try to live your life as normally as you can.”

“Like you two?” I asked.

It was a bit of a low blow, but Callum laughed.

“I think she’s getting it,” he said.

26

IT WAS ALMOST THREE IN THE MORNING WHEN STEPHEN dropped me off at Wexford, but there were lots of lights on in the windows. I saw people looking out as I stepped from the police car.