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The Name of the Star
“So,” I said. “You and Jerome? What’s the story?”
Jazza cocked her head to the side in a decidedly birdlike fashion.
“No,” she said, laughing. “Don’t be disgusting. Me and Jerome? I mean … I love Jerome, but we’re friends. No. He’s asking you out.”
“He’s asking me out by asking me to ask you?”
“Correct,” she said.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier just to ask me?”
“You don’t know Jerome,” Jazza said. “He doesn’t do things the easy way.”
My spirits perked right up again.
“So,” I said, “do you want to go, or …”
“Well, I should,” she said. “Because if I don’t, he might get nervous and not go. He needs me there for support.”
“This is complicated,” I said. “Are all English people like you guys?”
“No,” she said. “Oh, I knew it! This is perfect.”
I loved the way she said perfect. Pahh-fect. It was pahhfect.
In order to go out, Jazza worked without pause the entire afternoon. I sat at my desk pretending to do the same, but my mind was wandering too much. I spent about two hours online quietly trying to look up what you were supposed to wear to a pub, but the Internet is useless for things like that. I got a terrible range of advice, from American travel sites (who advocated a wardrobe of non-wrinkle travel basics and a raincoat) to a bunch of English sites about how all girls at all pubs wore skirts that were too short or heels that were too high and how they all fell over drunk in the street—which prompted another half hour of angry searching about misogyny and feminism, because that kind of thing drives me nuts.
My problem sets, sadly, did not do themselves during this time. Nor did my reading read itself. I tried to tell myself that I was learning about culture, but even I wasn’t going to be fooled by that. It was five o’clock before I knew it, and Jazza stirred and said something about getting dressed. On Saturday nights, you could wear whatever you wanted to dinner. This would be the first time I would greet Wexford as a whole in some Actual Clothes.
Since I still didn’t know what to wear, I delayed a bit by switching on some music and watching Jazza change. She put on jeans; I put on jeans. She put on a light blouse; I put on a T-shirt. She put her hair up; I put my hair up. She skipped the makeup, but there, I diverged. I also wore a black velvet jacket. This was a present from my grandmother, one of the few things she’d ever gotten me that I wasn’t skeeved to wear in public. Since I’m pretty pale—years of excessive sunscreen and being slowly bled to death by swamp mosquitoes—the rich black looked dramatic. I added some red lipstick, which may have been a touch too far, but Jazza said I looked nice, and she seemed to mean it. I also wore a star necklace, a gift from Cousin Diane.
The refectory was only three-quarters full, if that. Lots of people, Jazza explained, just skipped Saturday dinner entirely and started their evenings early. I got to look at the clothing choices of those who had stayed, and was happy to see that I had been wise to copy Jazza. Nobody was wearing anything too fancy—jeans, skirts, sweaters, T-shirts. Jerome was dressed in a brown hoodie and jeans. We ate quickly and headed out. I was shivering in my jacket. They didn’t even need jackets. It was also still quite bright, even though it was after seven. We walked for several blocks, Jazza and Jerome chatting about things I neither knew nor understood, when Jazza began to look around in confusion.
“I thought we were going to the pub,” she said.
“We are,” Jerome replied.
“The pub is that way,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction. “Which one are we going to?”
“The Flowers and Archers.”
“The Flowers and … oh. No. No.”
“Come on, Jazzy,” Jerome said. “We have to show your roommate here around.”
“But it’s a crime scene. You can’t go into a crime scene.”
Even as she said this, we caught the first glimpse of it all. The news trucks came first, their satellites extended. There were maybe two dozen of those. There was a whole section of sidewalk filled with reporters talking at cameras. Then there were the police cars, the police vans, and the mobile crime scene units. Then there were the people, so many people. Some sort of cordon had obviously been put up, so the people grouped around it. There had to be a hundred or more, just watching and taking pictures. We made it to the back of the crowd.
“Just let me get some pictures, and we’ll go to a real pub,” Jerome said, zipping off and squeezing through.
I stood on my toes a little to try to catch sight of the Flowers and Archers. It was just an ordinary-looking pub—black, large windows, cheerfully painted wooden arms over the door, a blackboard sign out front advertising a special. Only the dozens of police officers swarming around it like ants gave any indication of the terror that had occurred here. I suddenly felt uncomfortable. An unpleasant chill went up my back.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s stand back.”
I almost walked straight into a man who was standing right behind us. He was dressed in a suit with a slightly too-large jacket. He was completely and smoothly bald. His lack of hair highlighted his eyes, which were feverishly bright. When I apologized, the eyes grew wider, in what appeared to be shock.
“Not at all,” he replied. “Not at all.”
He stepped aside to let me pass, smiling widely.
“People are treating this like it’s a party,” Jazza said, looking at the people standing around with bottles of beer, taking photos on their phones and holding up video cameras. “Look how happy everyone seems.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Jerome said not to tell you. And I forgot when you started explaining all of the asking-out stuff.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I should have realized.”
Jerome jogged back, beaming.
“I got right up to the front of the tape,” he said. “Come on. Proper drink now.”
We went to a pub a few streets over, closer to Wexford. The pub did not disappoint. It was everything the Internet had promised—big wooden bar, a decent crowd, pint glasses. Of the three of us, only Jerome was over eighteen, plus Jazza said he owed us for taking us to the murder site—so he was put in charge of buying all the drinks. Jazza wanted a glass of wine, but I wanted a beer, because that is what I’d heard you were supposed to drink at a pub. Jerome duly went off to the bar. All the inside seats were taken, so we went outside and stood at a small table under a heat lamp. The diameter brought us face-to-face with each other, our skin glowing red under the light. Jazza made short work of her glass of wine. A pint of beer, as it turns out, is a lot of beer. But I was determined to get it down.
Jerome had more to tell us about the events of the day. “The victim,” he said, “not only had the same last name as the victim in 1888, she was the same age, forty-seven. She worked for a bank in the City, and she lived in Hampstead. Whoever this murderer is, he went to a lot of trouble to get the details right. Somehow, he got a woman with the right name of the right age to a pub nowhere near her house, and over a mile away from her work. At five in the morning. They’re saying it doesn’t look like she was bound or brought in with any struggle.”
“Jerome is going to be a journalist,” Jazza explained.
“Just listen,” Jerome said, pointing at the roof, just above the door. “Look up. It’s a CCTV camera. Most pubs have them. On that stretch alone, by the Flowers and Archers? I counted five cameras there. On Durward Street? At least six on the path the victim was walking along. If they don’t have footage of the Ripper, then something is seriously wrong with the system.”
“Jerome is going to be a journalist,” Jazza said again. She was tipsy, rocking a little to the music.
“I’m not the only one who’s noticed this!”
I looked up at the camera. It was a fairly large one, long and thin, its electronic eye pointed right at us. There was another one next to it pointing in the other direction, so that both halves of the pub garden were covered.
“I’m not a prefect,” Jazza said suddenly.
“Come on, Jazzy,” he said, tucking up under her arm.
“She is.”
Jazza was talking about Charlotte, obviously.
“And what else is she?” Jerome asked.
Jazza didn’t offer any reply, so I chimed in with, “A bitchweasel?”
“A bitchweasel!” Jazza’s face lit up. “She’s a bitchweasel! I love my new roommate.”
“She’s a bit of a lightweight,” Jerome explained. “And never let her have gin.”
“Gin bad,” Jazza said. “Gin make Jazza barf.”
Jazza sobered quickly on the way home, which was exactly when I felt the fizziness in my own head. I started to tell Jerome some of the stories I’d been telling Jazza the other night—Uncle Bick and Miss Gina, Billy Mack, Uncle Will. When he dropped us off on the steps under the large WOMEN sign over our door, he had a strange and unreadable look in his eye. Charlotte was sitting at the desk in our front lobby, a checklist and a Latin book in front of her.
“Nice night?” she asked as we came in.
“Wonderful,” Jazza said, a little too loudly. “And you?”
For the first time, as I walked up the winding stairs, I felt like I was coming home for the night. I looked down the long stretch of our hallway, with its gray carpets and odd bends and multiple fire doors breaking the path, and it all seemed very familiar and right.
The rest of the night was cozy. Jazza settled down with her German. I replied to some e-mails from my friends back home and noodled around on the Internet for a while and thought about doing French. Nothing disturbed my peace of mind until I was pulling the curtains for the night. As I did, something caught my eye. I had already yanked the curtain shut before my brain registered that it had seen something it didn’t like, but when I opened it again, there was nothing out there but some wet trees and cobblestones. It had started to rain. I stared for a moment, trying to figure out what I’d seen. Something had been right below—a person. Someone had been standing in front of the building. But that was no surprise. People stood in front of the building all the time.
“What’s the matter?” Jazza asked.
“Nothing,” I said, pulling the curtain shut again. “Thought I saw something.”
“This is the problem with all of this media coverage of the Ripper. It makes people afraid.”
She was right, of course. But I noticed she pulled the curtains on her side more tightly closed as well.
GOULSTON STREET, EAST LONDON
SEPTEMBER 8
9:20 P.M.
Of course now was the deadline to get this website done, one of her biggest and most lucrative jobs of the year. The contract had no provision for lateness due to the fact that the Ripper chose to strike directly across the street, at her pub. In fact, she had installed the CCTV cameras at the pub after they had been robbed last year. Because she was friendly with the owner, she’d done it for a fraction of the normal cost. In return, he provided her with free drinks. Earlier in the day, she’d watched the police remove the recorder. They would be watching the results of her work …
Didn’t matter. Nor did the sirens, the noise of the ever-increasing numbers of police going in and out of the mobile lab parked outside of her building, the helicopter that flew overhead constantly, the police who came to her door to ask if she’d seen anything. Normally, she could wander out in her bleach-stained TALK NERDY TO ME T-shirt, her old tracksuit bottoms, her slippers, her pink and bleached blond hair piled into a messy knot on top of her head and secured with a plastic clamp meant to tie back computer wires. This was completely acceptable attire for grabbing a double espresso at Wakey Wakey. Today, she couldn’t even step outside because the whole area was roped off and all the world’s press was standing at the end of the road.
Nope. No excuses. Either she finished today, or she didn’t get paid.
As a concession to the event, she had the news on her muted television. Every once in a while, she would glance over and stare at aerial views of her own building, long shots of the front of her house. Once, she even caught a glimpse of herself in the window. She resolutely ignored the two dozen messages from friends and family, begging to know what was going on.
But then something caught her attention. It was a new banner at the bottom of the news screen. It read: CCTV FAILURE. She quickly turned up the sound in time to catch the gist of the report.
“…as in the first murder on Durward Street. This second failure of CCTV to capture any useful images of the individual dubbed the New Ripper calls into question the effectiveness of London’s CCTV system.”
“Failure?” Veronica said out loud.
The website instantly faded in importance.
No. She had not failed. She had to prove those cameras had not failed. It took a moment of thought, but then she remembered that the footage was backed up to an online server, and she had the documentation around somewhere. She got down on the floor, threw open a document file, and dumped out the contents. This was the box where she stuffed manuals and warrantees for all her equipment. Toaster oven, no. Kettle, no. Television, no …
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
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.”
