Then, she found it. The paperwork for the cameras, with the access codes scribbled in pen on the front.
Of course, this meant she had to watch the footage.
She went to the kitchen, opened up a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle of whiskey—the good stuff, a birthday gift from a Scottish ex-boyfriend. This was the stuff she touched only on very special occasions. She poured herself a heavy shot into a juice glass and drank it all in one go. Then she pulled her curtains shut and sat in front of her computer. She went to the site, entered the codes, and was granted access. She clicked through the options, selecting Playback.
According to the news, the murder had occurred between five thirty and six in the morning. She set the playback time to start at 6:05. Then, with a deep breath, she hit Play, and then Rewind.
The footage was shot in night vision mode, which gave it a strange green-gray cast. And the first thing she saw was the body. It lay there alone on the concrete patio by the fence. It was strangely peaceful, if you ignored the gaping wound in the abdomen and the dark pool around it. Veronica swallowed hard and tried to control her breathing. Failure, her arse.
She could have stopped right there, could have immediately called the police, but something compelled her to keep watching. Horrible as it was, there was something compelling about being the first person to see the killer. He (or she) had to be on here.
She would be a hero—the person who recovered the footage. The person who caught the Ripper on film.
Veronica slowed it down, reversing gingerly. She watched the eerie sight of the blood seeping back into the body. The time markers ticked back. At 5:42 A.M., some of the dark objects around the woman began to move. Now Veronica could see what they were—intestines, a stomach—tucked neatly back into a gaping abdomen. Then the abdomen itself was carefully sealed up with the flash of a knife. The woman sat up, then rose from the ground in a sudden and unnatural way. The knife sealed a wound on her neck. Now she crashed into the fence. Now she was flailing. She was walking backward out of the garden.
Veronica paused the image at time stamp: 5:36 A.M.
The cameras had not failed, but her mind was slowly grasping what they had captured. And what they had captured made no sense. She became bizarrely calm, and played back the footage in the right order. Then she rewound and played it back again. Then she went to the kitchen and poured herself another juice glass full of whiskey. She threw up into the sink, wiped her mouth, and drank a glass of water.
She couldn’t keep this to herself. She would go mad.
PERSISTENT ENERGY
Instead of describing a ‘ghost’ as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of a persistent energy.
—Fred Myers,
Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research 6,
1889
10
THE AUTUMN OF 1888 WAS KNOWN AS THE AUTUMN of Terror. Jack the Ripper was out there somewhere, in the fog, waiting with his knife. He could strike anywhere, at any time. The thing about autumn this year was that everyone knew precisely when the Ripper was going to strike, if he kept up with the schedule he’d set so far. The next date was September 30. That was when Jack the Ripper struck twice, so it was referred to as “the Double Event.” The Double Event was a big part of the reason Jack the Ripper was seen as so amazingly scary—he managed these brutal and somewhat complicated murders right under the eye of the police, and no one saw a thing.
On that point, the past and the present were exactly alike.
The police had nothing. So, to help them, thousands more people joined the ranks of amateur detectives. They flew in from around the world. There was, the news reported, a 25 percent increase in tourism during the month of September. Hotels in London were getting unprecedented numbers of reservations. And all those people came to hang out in our neighborhood, to crawl over every inch of the East End. You couldn’t walk anywhere without someone taking pictures or making a video. The Ten Bells, which is the Ripper pub where the victims used to drink, was just a few streets over and had lines of people waiting to get in that stretched down the block. Hundreds of people shuffled past our buildings every day on any one of the ten Jack the Ripper walking tours that crossed our campus (until Mount Everest complained, and they rerouted around the corner).
The Ripper shaped our school life as well. The school had sent out letters to all our parents assuring them that we would be kept under nonstop lock-and-key surveillance, so really, school was the best place for us to be, and it was best to proceed as normal and not disrupt anyone’s studies. On the night following the second murder, they changed all the rules about leaving school grounds. We had to be present and accounted for by eight o’clock every night, including weekends. We could be in our houses or the library. Prefects were stationed in both of these places, and they had clipboards with all our names. You had to check out with the prefect at your house, then check in with the prefect at the front desk of the library, then vice versa when you went home.
This caused major outrage, as it effectively killed all social life for the month of September. Everyone was used to being able to go to the pub on the weekends, or to parties. All that was over. In response, people started stocking their rooms with large amounts of alcohol, until an additional set of rules gave the prefects the power to do spot checks. Huge quantities were confiscated, making many people wonder what Everest was doing with all that booze. Somewhere on the school grounds, there was a Big Rock Candy Mountain of alcohol—a magical closet filled to the ceiling.
During that precious hour or so between dinner and eight o’clock, everyone would run out to whatever shop was still open to get their provisions for the night, whatever they might be. Some people got coffees. Some people got food. Some people ran to Boots, the pharmacy, to get shampoo or toothpaste. Some people ran to a pub for an incredibly fast round of drinks. Some people would vanish completely for the hour to make out with a significant other. Then there was an insane influx—the run back to Wexford. You would see this rush coming around the corner at 7:55.
There were two people not complaining about the new rules—the inhabitants of Hawthorne room twenty-seven. For Jazza, this was life as normal. She was perfectly content and cozy at home, working away. And while I occasionally scratched at the window and looked longingly outside, I appreciated the new rules for the one benefit they accidentally conferred—the curfew was a great equalizer. The entire social dynamic had altered. There was no question of who was going to what party or what club or pub. We were all inmates of Wexford. During those three weeks, it became my home.
Jazza and I developed our rituals. I’d put the Cheez Whiz on the radiator right before dinner. I developed this little trick by accident, but it worked amazingly well. Around nine at night, it would be perfect, warm and runny. Every night, Jazza and I had a ritual of tea and biscuits and rice crisps with Cheez Whiz.
I had lucked out on the roommate front. Jazza, with her wide eyes, her adorable caution, her relentless determination to do the nice thing. Jazza missed her dogs and taking long, hot baths, and she promised to take me home with her to where she lived, out in the wilds of Cornwall. She liked to go to bed at ten thirty and read Jane Austen with a cup of tea. She didn’t care if I sat up, screwing around on the Internet or desperately cramming English literature into my brain or fumbling my way through French essays until three in the morning. In fact, those new rules probably saved my academic life as well. There was nothing to do but study. On Friday and Saturday, we’d get mildly drunk on mugs full of cheap red wine (supplied by Gaenor and Angela, who managed to stash theirs so cleverly that no one could find it) and then run in circles around the building.
That’s how September went. By the end of it, everyone on my floor knew about Cousin Diane, Uncle Bick, Billy Mack. They had admired the pictures of my grandma in her negligee. I learned that Gaenor was deaf in one ear, that Eloise had once been attacked on the street in Paris
, Angela had a skin condition that made her itchy all the time, Chloe down the hall wasn’t a horrible snob—her father had recently died. When a little tipsy, Jazza did complicated dance routines with props.
People got more and more bitter about these rules as we approached the twenty-ninth. In response to the police request that everyone stay either at home or in a group, it was now a city-wide party. Pubs were offering two-for-one drinks. Betting shops had odds on where bodies would be found. Regular programming on BBC One had been replaced by all-night news coverage, and the other stations were running every kind of Ripper or murder mystery show they had. People were throwing lock-in parties in their houses to watch. The Double Event night was bigger than New Year’s and we were not going to be a part of it.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth, there was an uncertain sky on the edge of rain. I trudged over to the refectory, limping a bit because of a brief romance my thigh had with a flying hockey ball during one of the rare moments I wasn’t guarding the goal in my head-to-toe padding. I guess I wasn’t overly concerned about the Ripper. In my mind, Jack the Ripper was a ridiculous creature that always lived in London. On that day, though, I saw the first signs of people really flaking out. I heard someone say that she didn’t even want to go outside. Two people left school entirely for a few days. I saw one of them pulling her bag along the cobblestones.
“People are being serious,” I said to Jazza.
“There’s a serial killer out there,” she said. “Of course people are serious.”
“Yeah, but what are the chances?”
“I’ll bet all the victims thought that.”
“But still, what are the chances?”
“Well, I imagine they are several million to one.”
“Not that high,” Jerome said, coming up behind us. “You’re only dealing with a small part of London. And while there might be a million or more people in that area, the Ripper is probably focusing on women, because all of the original victims were women. So halve that—”
“You really need another hobby,” Jazza said, opening the door to the refectory.
“I have plenty of hobbies. Anyway, the Ripper never showed any interest in kids or teenagers, so I don’t think we have anything to worry about. Does that make you feel better?”
“Not particularly,” Jazza said.
“Well, I tried.”
Jerome stepped aside to let me go in first. We got in line and loaded our plates. We had barely started eating when Mount Everest rumbled in with Claudia and Derek, the housemaster of Aldshot, in tow.
“They don’t look happy,” Jerome said.
He was right. There was a frazzled gloom around all three of them. They walked up to the dais in formation, Everest moving to the front, and Claudia and Derek flanking him with their arms folded across their chests, like bodyguards.
“Everyone!” he said. “Silence. I have an announcement to make.”
It took a moment for word to spread to all parts of the refectory that it was time to shut up.
“This evening,” he began, “as you all know, there is going to be a great deal of police activity in London because of the Ripper situation. Therefore, we are altering the schedule for today. All school activities after four P.M. are canceled so that teachers may return home.”
A cheer broke out.
“Settle down!” he said. “Dinner will be moved up to five P.M. so that kitchen staff can also return home before dark. All students will return to their houses after dinner and will remain there for the night. All other buildings will be off-limits and locked, including the library.”
A low groan went around the room.
“I want to convey the seriousness of this,” Everest added. “Anyone who attempts to leave school grounds faces the possibility of expulsion. Is that understood?”
He waited until he got a grumbled yes.
“I will meet with all prefects now, in my office.”
Jerome took a second to shove some extra food into his mouth before rising. At the end of our table, I saw Charlotte bounce up.
“This means I won’t have that extra hockey practice this afternoon,” I said to Jazza. “No hockey. No hockey.”
I banged my spoon on the table for emphasis, but she didn’t get excited.
“I wish I’d gone home,” Jazza said, poking at her food.
“It’s going to be great,” I said, shaking her arm. “No hockey! And I totally think my new shipment of Cheez Whiz might get here today.”
True enough. I’d told all my friends I was out, and I fully expected to find a pigeonhole full of whizzy goodness this afternoon. But not even the promise of Cheez Whiz could remove the frown from Jazza’s face.
“It’s creepy,” she said, rubbing her arms. “All of this has just made things . . . I don’t know. Everyone’s afraid. One man has made the entirety of London afraid.”
There was nothing I could do. Jazza just didn’t see the positive side of this. So I continued eating my sausages and let her have her moment. I was already thinking about the joy I’d feel in not walking to the hockey field and not standing in the goal and not getting hit with hockey balls. As a swimmer, it was a bliss she could never know.
11
THE POLICE ENCOURAGE LONDONERS TO USE EXTRA caution this evening. The public are advised to walk in pairs or groups. Avoid areas of low lighting. Most important, don’t panic—carry on your lives as normal. As they said in the Second World War, ‘Keep calm and carry on’. . . ”
So we were inside again, and like everyone else in London—and around the world, probably—we were all gathered around the television. The common room was packed to capacity. Most people had work they were doing, or they had their computers on their laps. We had hours to wait for news to report anything of interest, so newscasters were filling the time with statements like that. Keep calm and carry on. Also, stay in and hide because the Ripper is coming.
Luckily, we all had his schedule. Like an evil Santa, there was no doubt when he did his work. On the night of the Double Event, the first attack occurred in a dark alley somewhere around twelve forty-five A.M. on the morning of the thirtieth. The victim was named Elizabeth “Long Liz” Stride. Her throat was cut, but she wasn’t, like the other victims, disemboweled. For some reason, the Ripper left the scene and hurried about a mile away, to a place called Mitre Square. There he murdered and completely mutilated a woman named Catherine Eddowes in five or ten minutes flat. They knew that because a policeman walked through Mitre Square at one thirty, and nothing was going on. When he walked through again fifteen minutes later, there were the gruesome remains.
As for the route: Liz Stride was murdered on Berner Street, now called Henriques Street. From there, he hurried west to Mitre Square. Mitre Square was a mere ten-minute walk from Wexford.
Up until now, the Ripper hadn’t really freaked me out much. But with every passing hour, it started to have more of an effect on me. Two people were going to get murdered tonight, right around where I was sitting. And the whole world was going to sit and watch, just like we were.
The first news broke at 12:57. We all knew it was coming, but it was still a shock when the news anchor touched his ear and listened for a moment.
“Just coming in . . . The body of a woman has been found on Davenant Street, just off Whitechapel Road. Details are still coming in, but the first report indicates it was found in a car park or possibly outside of a petrol station. We can’t confirm either story. The police are now spreading out and covering everything within a mile radius. Two thousand police officers and special constables have been deployed into the streets of East London. Let’s go to the interactive map . . .”
They had instantly created a live map with the murder scene and a circle radiating out from it in red. Our school was smack in the middle of this red section. The entire common room fell silent. Everyone looked up from what they were doing.
“I can now confirm that the body of a man has been found on Davenant Street, in a sm
all private car park. Witnesses who found the body say that the victim had a wound to the neck. Though we have no further details at this time, that is consistent with the Ripper murders. I have with me Dr. Harold Parker, professor of psychology at University College, London, and technical adviser to the Metropolitan Police.”
The camera panned over to a bearded man.
“Dr. Parker,” the anchor asked. “What’s your first reaction to this information?”
“Well,” the doctor began, “the first thing of note here is that the victim is a man. All the Ripper victims of 1888 were female prostitutes. However, it should also be noted that the third Ripper victim, Elizabeth Stride, was the only one who had no mutilations. Only her neck was cut. If this turns out to be the work of the new Ripper, it suggests a different pathology. This Ripper doesn’t care about the sex or the profession of the victim—”
“I can’t watch this anymore,” Jazza said. “I’m going upstairs.”
Jaz got out of her chair and stepped over the various people sitting on the floor around us. I didn’t want to stop watching, but she was clearly upset, and I didn’t want to leave her alone.
“I hate what they’re doing,” she said as I followed her. “I hate the show they’re making of all of this. It’s horrible, and it’s frightening, and people treat it like it’s reality television.”
“I think they’re just reporting it because people want to know,” I said, following her a few steps behind.
“I don’t have to watch it, though.”
My Cheez Whiz had, sadly, not arrived. I offered to make Jazza some tea instead, but she didn’t want any. She planted herself on her bed and started refolding her laundry. We had a service at Wexford where they came once a week and took away our laundry bags, and when we returned in the afternoon, we’d find them outside our door, our clothes clean and folded. But Jazza always shook out her things and refolded them in her special way. I sat on my own bed and took out my computer, but before I could even open it, my phone rang. It was Jerome. I’d recently given him my number in art history so that we could meet up to work on a project. This was the only time he’d ever called.
The The Name of the Star Page 7
