Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

This time, his hesitation didn’t seem to be connected to me. He smoked for a moment, then tossed the cigarette to the ground and stomped it out.

“It certainly looked to me like Newman was the doer. The others were unarmed and had all been shot. He had a gun in his hand and the wound in his head looked self-inflicted—but it was very dark. You don’t want to accuse a fellow officer of something like that without proof, but . . . anyway, they got us out of there pretty quick. I don’t even remember seeing the SOCOs down there. No one was taking pictures or anything. They got us out of there and told us to keep schtum, which I have until now. There was a rumor—just a rumor, mind you—that Newman had been sectioned at some point. We all suspected that he’d had some kind of breakdown, killed the others, maybe under the stress of working undercover for too long. The official story was drugs bust, and we never challenged it. Those officers were dead. Nothing was going to bring them back. Their families deserved peace. But that scene was wrong. I always knew it was wrong. You’re telling me this has to do with the Ripper?”

“Is there anything else you remember about that night?” Stephen asked.

“Just that it was terrible,” he said. “You don’t see many like that, and you don’t want to. Once in a lifetime is enough.”

“Nothing else? Nothing strange?”

“I suppose,” Maybrick said, “there was one odd thing. When we found Newman, he was holding a Walkman.”

“A what?” Callum said.

“You’re too young for that, I suppose,” he said. “A Sony Walkman. A music player. Used to be the thing. Played tape cassettes. He wasn’t just holding it—he was clutching it tight to his body. Strange thing to be clutching during a drugs bust or a mass shooting, at any rate.”

Stephen’s expression changed instantly. His eyebrows rose so much, they seemed to drag his entire face along for the ride.

“That means something to you?” the sergeant asked. “What’s going on here? I deserve to know. I’ve got a lot of people out on the street tonight looking for this bastard.”

“Thank you,” Stephen said. The deep, serious voice was dropped. This was normal Stephen. In fact, there was a shake in his voice. “That’ll be all.”

There weren’t a lot of options for places to huddle at three in the morning on Ripper night, so we sat in the police car a few streets over, the engine idling.

“I’m not sure what we just learned,” Callum said. “I just know I feel sick.”

For once, I wasn’t the only one who was completely baffled and uninformed. Stephen had fixed his gaze straight ahead, at the back of a van.

“Stephen?” Callum said. “Tell me you aren’t thinking what I’m thinking. Please tell me that.”

“A Walkman,” Stephen said quietly. “Before mobile phones, that would have been the perfect device. Same idea. A common object that anyone could be seen carrying. A few buttons to push to send an electrical current through the stones. A Tube station used as an office. A body found clutching a Walkman. They weren’t undercovers—they were us . The squad wasn’t disbanded because of funding—it was disbanded because one of us went insane and murdered everyone else.”

Callum laughed darkly and dragged his hands over his face.

“A dead station,” he said. “For the dead police. That’s what they’re called, the disused ones. Dead stations.”

“He knows we exist,” Stephen went on, his gaze still fixed. “All the messages. Murdering people in front of cameras. He wanted to make sure we knew he was a ghost. He wanted to get our attention. He knows us. He’s one of us.”

“This seems like an ambush,” Callum said. “If you’re right, he wants us to go to the place where he murdered the entire previous squad. I’ve been in those tunnels and old stations. If you don’t know your way around, you’re in trouble.”

“If we don’t go,” Stephen said, “he’s going to kill people. This is our one and only chance. And we have to decide now.”

Callum exhaled loudly and banged his head against the headrest. In the distance, I could hear the neer-ner-neer-ner-neerner of sirens, police cars chasing a man they could never see, never catch.

“Can’t you call someone?” I said. “Get someone to tell you what to do?”

“There is no one,” Stephen said. “We have superiors, but no one can make this decision. There’s too little time and too little information. It’s up to us.”

He opened the computer once again.

“King William Street station,” he said. “Popular with urban explorers. They have drawings and photos up. Built in 1890, closed in 1900. During the Second World War it was converted into an air raid shelter . . . There are two access points. The main one is in the basement of a large office building called Regis House on King William Street, like the sergeant just said. That leads to the original spiral emergency staircase. You go down seventy-five feet to the tunnels. The other access point is at London Bridge station. The old King William Street tunnels are used for ventilation for that station. The only people who can get down there are London Underground engineers. The public can’t go down there anymore, because it’s full of live cables.”

“My favorite words,” Callum said. “Live cables.”

“You can go in through London Bridge,” Stephen said. “It sounds like you can cross under the Thames through a tunnel. I can go down the steps. We’ll come at him from two directions and get him between us. I’m not saying this is completely safe, or that it’s ideal. But we are quite literally the only people who can stop him, and this is the only time we’ve ever known where he plans to be. We signed up to this job for a reason.”

“Because we’re freaks,” Callum said. “Because we’re unlucky.”

“Because we can do something other people can’t.”

“But they didn’t tell us about this, did they? They didn’t tell us that someone on the last squad went mental and murdered the others.”

“Would you mention that?” Stephen asked simply.

I don’t plan many sieges or raids, but even I know that it’s bad when you are going somewhere through a basement, to a place seventy-five feet underground that most people aren’t even aware of.

“I hate this plan,” Callum finally said. “But I know you’ll go down there alone if I don’t go. So I guess I’m in.”

“I have to go with you,” I said.

It’s not that I am extremely brave—I think I just forgot myself for a minute. Maybe that’s what bravery is. You forget you’re in trouble when you see someone else in danger. Or maybe there is a limit to how afraid you can get, and I’d hit it. Whatever the case, I meant what I said.

“Not a chance,” Stephen said quickly. “We’re hiding you somewhere along the way.”

“You don’t have a choice,” I said. “Neither do I. He wants me. He’s going to come after me. And if you fail, he’s going to get me eventually.”

“She’s right,” Callum said.

“She’s never done this before,” Stephen said.

“ You’ve barely done this before,” I countered. “Look, Callum just said this sounds like an ambush. You can’t just sneak in and hope you’ll corner him. You need something to keep him busy.”

“She’s right,” Callum said again. “I hate this entire conversation, but she’s right.”

“She’s also unarmed,” Stephen countered. “The other terminus is with Boo. She’s going to need it if he decides to go into Wexford instead. We can’t leave her helpless.”

“Let me put this another way,” I said. “I’m coming. I’m not asking permission. I can’t live like this. I can’t live not knowing how this ends.”