“So this killer is following one version of the story?” I said.
“Right. He’s not even following a very nuanced version of the story. It’s pretty much the Wikipedia version or the version from the movies. The name. That’s another issue. Jack the Ripper never called himself Jack the Ripper. Just like now, there were dozens of hoaxes. Loads of people sent letters to the press claiming to be the murderer. Only about three of these letters were considered to be even possibly real—and now the general opinion is that they’re all fakes. One was the ‘From Hell’ letter, which is the one that James Goode got. Another was signed Jack the Ripper. That one was probably written by someone from the Star newspaper. The Star got famous because of Jack the Ripper. They took the stories of these murders and created one of the first media superstars. And they did a really good job, because here we are, over a hundred years later, still obsessed.”
“But there have been other murderers since,” I said. “Lots of them.”
“But Jack the Ripper was kind of the original. See, he was around when the police force was fairly new and psychology was just starting out. People understood why someone might kill to steal something, or out of anger, or out of jealousy. But here was a man killing for seemingly no reason at all, hunting down vulnerable, poor women, cutting them apart. There was no explanation. What made him so terrifying was that he didn’t need a reason. He just liked to kill. And the papers played the story up until people were mad with fear. He’s the first modern killer.”
“So who did it?” I asked. “They have to know.”
“No,” Jerome said, leaning back. “They don’t know. They never will know. The evidence is gone. The suspects and witnesses are long dead. The vast majority of the original Jack the Ripper case files are gone. Keeping records for the long term wasn’t considered that important back then. Things got thrown away. People took souvenirs. Papers got moved, lost. Lots of records were lost in the war. It’s exceedingly unlikely that we will ever find anything that conclusively identifies Jack the Ripper. But that won’t stop people from trying. They’ve been trying nonstop since 1888. It’s the one magic case that everyone wants to solve and no one can. Pretending to be Jack the Ripper is pretty much the scariest thing you could possibly do because he’s a total unknown. He’s the one that got away with it. Does any of this actually make you feel better?”
“Not really,” I said. “But it’s . . .”
This time, it was definitely me. I leaned into him, and he put his arm over my shoulders. Then I put my head against his, and his curls pressed into my cheek. From there, it was a slow turn of the head until our faces were together. I started pressing my lips into his cheek—just a hint of a kiss, just to see how it went. I felt his shoulders release, and he made a little noise that was partly a groan, partly a sigh. He kissed my neck, up, up, up to my ear. My muscle control began to slip away, as did my sense of my surroundings. My body flushed itself with all the good chemicals that it keeps in reserve for making out. They make you stupid. They make you wobbly. They make you not care about Jack the Ripper or ghosts.
I reached up and ran my hand along the back of his neck, deep into his hair, then I pulled his face closer.
23
CLEARLY, JEROME AND I HAD A COMPLICATED THING going on. He told me scary Jack the Ripper facts, and I had the sudden need to make out with him until I ran out of breath. I would have continued indefinitely if Boo hadn’t bounded up to us like a deranged puppy. Jerome and I detached so quickly that a thin bridge of saliva connected us for a glittering moment. I swung it away.
“Heya!” she said. “Sorry! I didn’t realize you came here too! Came over for a coffee.”
She held up a coffee as proof.
Jerome was so startled that he had a violent coughing fit.
“Well,” he said when he recovered. “I . . . well.
Hello.”
“Hi,” Boo said. She was still standing there, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d best get back. I have a physics lab to work on.”
He got up abruptly and left.
“Sorry,” Boo said. “It’s my job to follow. And I wouldn’t have interrupted, but I had an idea. You need a bit more practical experience. It’ll help you. And since you don’t have to do that paper and it’s Sunday, we can go out.”
Boo had an ability to attach herself to me and steer me around. Her grip was like iron. She began to move me out of the market and down the street, toward the Tube. About forty-five minutes later, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I turned up on Goodwin’s Court. Boo half dragged me down the alley and pressed the silver buzzer on their front door.
“How do you even know they’re home?” I asked.
“They’ll be home,” she said. “One of them’s always here.”
No answer. Boo buzzed again. There was a crashing noise, followed by an electronic squawk.
“What?” a male voice yelled.
“It’s me!” Boo yelled back. “I have Rory with me!”
“You what?”
I thought it was Callum, but it was hard to tell.
“Let us up!” Boo yelled.
A mumbled something on the other end, and the intercom went dead.
“I don’t think they like it when I come over,” I said.
“Oh, they don’t mind.”
“I think they do.”
Nothing from the door. Boo pushed the intercom again, and this time, the door buzzed open. Again, up the stairs with the automatic lighting. I could see that the staircase was very well maintained, with tasteful framed black-and-white photos up the staircase and a highly polished silver rail. The apartment on the first floor bore a small glass sign on the door:
DYNAMIC DESIGN. Upstairs, Callum was at the door, dressed in the same snug shirt and a pair of shorts. He held a mug of something steaming hot.
“What are you doing?” he asked Boo in a groggy morning voice.
“Just bringing Rory round.”
“Why?”
Boo ignored this and stepped past him, dragging me in with her.
“Where’s Stephen?” Boo asked, taking off her coat and hanging it on the rickety coat stand by the door. Callum collapsed onto the brown sofa and regarded us both with tired eyes.
“Out getting the papers.”
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“What are we always up to?”
He indicated the stacks of papers and folders scattered all over the table and the floor around it. Boo nodded, made a quick circuit of the room, and planted herself next to him. Stephen came in a moment later. He was dressed in a worn and slightly baggy pair of jeans. I’m not sure they were supposed to be baggy; I think he was just thin. With his striped black sweater, red scarf, and glasses, he really looked like a student, probably in the English department. Someone who quoted Shakespeare for fun and used Latin terms for things. He did not, under any circumstances, look like a cop. But as soon as he saw us, he got that look on his face—instantly focused.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Boo said. “I just brought Rory round.”
“Why?”
No. They didn’t want me here. Boo had not caught on to this.
“I was thinking,” she said. “We should go ghost-spotting. Rory’s never been.”
Stephen stood there for a minute, gripping his newspaper.
“Can I speak to you in the other room for a moment?” he said.
Boo got up, and the two of them disappeared into another room. Callum continued to sip his tea and watch me. In the other room, I could hear a very animated conversation, one low voice (Stephen’s) and one relatively higher voice (Boo’s). I distinctly heard Stephen say, “We are not social services.” The higher voice seemed to be winning.
“I didn’t ask to come here,” I said. “I mean, here, to this apartment. Today.”
“Oh, I know.” Callum stretched lazily and turned to watc
h the door where the conversation was going on. Last time, I had taken in the basics about Callum—he was black, he was shorter than Stephen, he was extremely well built, and he wasn’t thrilled about my presence. All of those things remained true today. In the daylight and in slightly less shock, I could take in some more. Like Boo, Callum had an athlete’s build—he wasn’t huge, just well developed in what looked like a very deliberate way. His face was round, with wide, appraising eyes and a mouth that always seemed to be cocked in a half smirk. He had very thick, very straight eyebrows, one of which was sliced through by a scar.
“What’s the thing on your arm?” I asked, pointing at his tattoo. “Is that some kind of monster?”
“It’s a Chelsea lion,” he said patiently. “For the football club.”
“Oh.”
I wasn’t being stupid. It didn’t look like a lion. It looked like a skinny dragon with no wings.
“So how do you like England so far?” he asked.
“It’s kind of weird. You know. Ghosts. Jack the Ripper.”
He nodded.
“Where are you from?” he said. “That accent?”
“Louisiana.”
“Where’s that again?”
“In the South,” I said.
The conversation in the other room had gone down in volume.
“I don’t even know why he bothered,” he said, stretching again. “Boo was always going to win. Better get dressed.”
He got up and went out of the room, leaving me alone. The apartment, I noticed, looked very much like Boo’s part of the room—stuff everywhere. Maybe seeing ghosts made you give up on cleaning. I could see that certain parts of the room were reserved for certain activities. The coffee table was for eating—it was covered in tinfoil takeout dishes and mugs. The table by the window had a computer and lots of files, with boxes full of more files on the floor. The walls around the table were covered in notes. I had a look at them. They all seemed to relate to the Ripper—dates, locations. I recognized some of the names and photographs of suspects from 1888 from the constant news coverage. What was unusual, though, is that there were comments about these people—places of burial, locations of death, home addresses. It looked like Stephen and Callum and Boo had gone to these places and checked them out, adding notes like “uninhabited” or “no evidence of presence.”
I moved away from the wall of notes when I heard someone returning. Stephen and Boo came back in, followed by Callum, who was now wearing jeans.
“Perhaps we should do an hour or two of ghost-spotting,” Stephen said, not sounding very enthusiastic. Boo was beaming and doing some hamstring stretches.
“We should take her underground,” Callum said. “It’s easier there. It’ll take five minutes, tops.”
“Maybe in the train tunnels,” Boo said. “But not on the platforms.”
“I work there. I should know. I saw about fifty once.”
“You never!”
“I did. Not all in one place, but all around one station.”
“Around one station? So in the tunnels, then.”
“Some of them were in the tunnels. But I’m telling you. Fifty.”
“You’re such a liar,” Boo said with a laugh.
“There’s one hanging around Charing Cross,” Callum said. “I’ve seen her loads of times. Let’s just take her there and get this over with.”
“Fine,” Stephen cut in. “Charing Cross.”
My approval was not needed on the idea.
It was a cool day. The sun was out, and the leaves were just changing. The other three, being English and used to colder weather, wore no coats. I did, and I pulled it tight around me as we walked down the busy streets, past some West End theaters and pubs, around a church and through Trafalgar Square. There were loads of tourists on the square, taking pictures of each other climbing on the huge lions at the base of Nelson’s Column, screaming as legions of pigeons swooped down at their heads. I didn’t really feel like a tourist anymore. I wasn’t sure what I was. I was definitely feeling increasingly self-conscious about being with these three, since I was a clear disruption to the routine and probably an annoyance, but feeling self-conscious was better than feeling crazy. They were ignoring me anyway and having a debate about paperwork.
“So then we fill out a G1 form . . . ,” Stephen was saying.
“What I don’t understand,” Callum replied, “is why we call it G1, since we only have one form. Can’t we just call it the form?”
“We only have one form now,” Stephen said, not looking up. “We might have other forms in the future. Also, G1 is actually shorter than the form.”
“Here’s a better question,” Callum replied. “Why have a form at all? Who’s going to check? Who’s going to care? No one knows we exist. No one wants to know we exist. We’re not taking people to court.”
“’Cause,” Boo said. “We need a record. We need to know what we did. We need it to train other people to do this job. And ghosts are still people. They were someone. Just because they’re not alive—”
“You know what? I think being alive should be a primary way of figuring out who is and who isn’t a person. I think that should be question number one. Are you alive? If yes, go on to question two. If no, you should not be reading this—”
“Oh, that’s such rubbish. One of my best friends happens to be a dead person.”
“All I’m saying is,” Callum said calmly, “since we can do this any way we want—and how often do you get that chance in life?—why did we choose to do this in a way that involves paperwork?”
“I can make a G2 if you want,” Stephen said magnanimously. “Just for you. Special form for interdepartmental incidents involving both the police and the transport system. We’ll call it Callum’s Form. A Callum 2A could be for the Underground. You’d get a Callum 2B for any incidents on buses. Maybe a Callum 2B-2 is any incident that takes place at a bus shelter.”
“I will kill you, you know.”
“And if you do,” Stephen said with a hint of a smile, “and I come back, I am going to haunt the hell out of you.”
We’d reached the steps of the Charing Cross Underground station, and Stephen turned to me and re-included me in the conversation.
“Here’s what you need to understand,” he said in a slightly lecturing tone. “London is one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities. We’ve had multiple wars, plagues, fires . . . and we keep building on top of old grave sites. Loads of buildings are built on old plague pits. The Tube system alone was responsible for disturbing thousands of graves. As far as we know, most ghosts tend to stay around the places they died, places that had some major significance in their lives, or, occasionally, the place where their body is buried. Their range varies. But the Tube has lots.”
“Lots and lots and lots,” Callum added as we reached the turnstiles.
Callum waved a pass that got him in for free. The rest of us tapped our Oyster cards, and the gates opened to admit us. I followed them to the escalators.
“The thing you have to remember,” Boo said, “is that ghosts are just people. That’s it. They aren’t scary. They aren’t out to get you”—Callum made a strange noise—“they aren’t spooky or weird, and they don’t fly around with sheets on their heads. They are just dead people who’ve gotten stuck here for a bit. They’re usually quite nice, if a little shy. Normally, they’re lonely and they like to talk, if they can.”
“If they can?”
“There’s a lot to learn,” Stephen said. “They take a lot of forms, some more corporeal than others.”
“So, who becomes a ghost? Everyone?”
“No. It’s fairly rare. From what we can tell, ghosts are people who just haven’t . . . died completely. Their death process isn’t complete, and they don’t leave.”
This I sort of understood. My parents work on a college campus, and I’d spent some time around it. Sometimes people graduate but they don’t leave. They hang around for years, for no reason.
I would think of ghosts like that, I decided.
“Ghosts look like people, so you often can’t tell the difference,” Boo said. “You have the ability to see them, but it doesn’t mean you know what you’re looking at.”
“It’s like hunting,” Callum cut in.
“It is nothing like hunting.” Boo elbowed him hard. “They’re people. They look like living people, because you’re used to seeing living people. You assume everyone you see is alive. You have to consciously start separating the living from the dead. It’s tricky at first, but you get the hang of it.”
“She’s down here,” Callum said. “I saw her on the Bakerloo Line platform.”
We followed him down the steps to that platform. The London Tube had such a reassuring, almost clinical appearance— white-tiled walls with black-tiled edges, neat and distinctive signage, the cheerfully colored map . . . signs showing the
WAY OUT and barriers to keep people moving in the right directions . . . staff in purple-blue suits and computer screens showing the status of trains . . . big ad posters and electronic ad boards that flashed mini-commercials. It didn’t look like something dug out of an old plague pit. It looked like a system that had been here for all of time, pumping people through the heart of the city.
A train had just come in, and the platform emptied out except for us and the handful of people who were too slow. Then I noticed the dark arches at each end of the platform, the openings for the trains leading to the tunnels—the wind that blew in with each train came from there. And when the train left, I noticed one woman in particular down at the far end of the platform. The toes of her shoes were just over the edge. She wore a black sweater with a thick cowl neck, a plain gray skirt, and a pair of gray platform shoes. Her hair was long and curled off her face in large wings. I guess what drew me to her—aside from the fact that she didn’t get on the train and her vaguely retro outfit—was her expression. It was the expression of someone who had given up completely. Her skin wasn’t just pale, it was faint and grayish. She was the kind of person you didn’t see, alive or dead.
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