The The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  The conversation was a brief one. Sergeant Maybrick marched back down the hall in our direction, past the curious desk officer.

  “Outside,” he said, walking right past us to the door.

  Once outside, he moved away from the building. He had a coughing fit, then took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

  “What are you?” he asked. “Special Branch? CID?”

  “I’m not authorized to tell you that,” Stephen said.

  “Then I really don’t want to know. You sure you want me to tell you this with her here?”

  I guess my pajamas didn’t inspire much confidence. Or the fact that I was hopping on my toes to keep warm.

  “I do,” Stephen said.

  “King William Street was a nasty business, one I was glad to have behind me.” Sergeant Maybrick shook his head and took a long drag of his cigarette. “Call came in that shots had been fired and officers were down. We didn’t know what they were doing down there or why. Four of us responded in the ARV. We were directed to a building on King William Street—Regis House. There was a door in the basement that led to the old station. It’s deep, no lift, long set of stairs. I remember sizing that situation up—four of us, walking into a completely unknown terrain, underground. If the shooter or shooters were still down there, they’d be cornered. They could pick us off on the stairs, or we could end up in a situation where they’d end up killing everyone. No good no matter how we looked at it. Absolute pitch-black down them steps, seemed to go on forever, round and round. Lost radio contact. We shouted that we were coming, flashed our lights—gave whoever was down there every chance to stand down. Dead silence.”

  He looked at me again before continuing.

  “The platform area was divided into two floors during the war. So there was a set of steps and an office on the upper floor. The door was open. Once we cleared the general platform area, two of us went up the stairs and another two went into the tunnels. I found a woman, Margo Riley, first. She was at her desk. David Lennox was on the floor by the supply cabinet. Mark Denhurst was in one of the back rooms. Jane Watson died with a pipe in her hand, trying to fight, I suppose. Katie Ellis was near the entrance of the tunnels. All of them long dead before we arrived.”

  “And Alexander Newman?”

  “We’d been told to look for six officers. We found five in more or less the same area. Newman was the one missing. We finally found him as well, deeper in the tunnels. Bullet to the head. Always bothered me. There was something not right about what I was seeing. It was only later that we found out it was an undercover operation, a drugs bust gone bad. The dealers had gotten access and were storing and moving cocaine through the old tunnels. It was a terrible scene, and strange. Not like any drugs bust I ever saw, and I’ve seen a few. There were no drugs around, no evidence of a firefight. It was some kind of office down there. It looked like a group of people killed while going about their business. And it looked to me . . .”

  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 c
an 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.”

  As soon as I said those words, I knew I had hit on the reason for my sudden burst of pure courage. I couldn’t go on this way—with this sight, knowing that some ghost could come after me. I was either going to stop this, or I was going to die trying.

  Stephen put his head in his hands for a moment, then beat a terse rhythm on the steering wheel. Then he turned on the sirens again and hit the gas.

  WHITE’S ROW, EAST LONDON NOVEMBER 9 2:45 A.M.

  IN 1888, MILLER’S COURT WAS A DARK OFFSHOOT OF Dorset Street, known as “the worst street in London.” Room thirteen, at 26 Dorset Street, had its own entrance on Miller’s Court. Room thirteen wasn’t even a real room—it was just an old back parlor cut off by a thin partition, twelve feet square, with a broken window. Inside, there was a bed, a table, and a fireplace. It was here that, on the morning of November 9, 1888, the body of Mary Kelly was discovered. She was found by her landlord, who came by at ten forty-five to collect the rent. It was the only time the Ripper struck indoors and the only time the crime scene was photographed. The hideous images of Mary Kelly in room thirteen entered the annals of history.

  Dorset Street was so irredeemable that in the 1920s, the buildings were all demolished to make room for the new fruit market being opened in Spitalfields. On the exact spot where room thirteen once stood, there was now a warehouse where trucks could deliver goods for the market. And at two A.M. on this November 9, over five thousand people had gathered there. They filled the narrow passage between the warehouse and the multistory car park and spilled out onto the streets around. Most of those people had come for an all-night vigil to honor all the Ripper’s victims, both from 1888 and the present.

  But there were other people there as well. There were dozens of news reporters babbling on to rolling cameras in dozens of different languages. There were dozens of police officers, uniformed and plainclothed, wandering the crowd. There were souvenir carts selling WELCOME BACK, JACK and I SURVIVED NOVEMBER 9TH AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS BLOODY T-SHIRT (complete with fake bloodstain) shirts. There were food and drink vendors selling hot chestnuts, sodas, tea, sausage rolls, and ice cream. In many ways, it looked like a carnival.

  No one noticed who started passing out the flyers. They just started circulating through the crowd and were passed on automatically. They contained six words only—no call to action, no instructions. Just a strange, simple message.

  Several minutes later, to bring the point home, a flood of flyers drifted from the sky. The drizzle dampened them and made them heavy and sticky, so some adhered to the walls as they came down. The crowd looked up at the multistory car park behind them. The flyers were still falling, but there was no one throwing them. They came and they came, handfuls at a time.

  One of the vigil organizers peeled a flyer off the wall and read it.

  “What is this?” she asked. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

  Because the car park was sitting more or less on the site of the fifth Ripper murder, it had been closed and locked down for the night. Several police officers patrolled the ground floor. No one could have gotten to the top. And yet that was where the flyers were coming from. There was a lot of talking into shoulder radios, and a team ran up to scout every level and find whoever was up there. Two more police officers were in the car park office, looking at the CCTV camera screens in confusion. They could see the flyers going out, but couldn’t see the person tossing them. The reports were coming in: “Level one, clear.” “Level two, clear.”

  Down in the street, the reporters stared up at the shower of paper. The cameras turned upward to get the shot. At least it was different, something to break up the monotony of waiting for this thing to happen, the endless newscaster drivel and footage of police cars cruising along.

  Only one person in the crowd saw who was throwing the flyers. That person was seventeen-year-old Jessie Johnson, who, three days before, had gone into anaphylactic shock after eating a peanut. She saw the woman in the 1940s army uniform leaning over from one of the levels, tossing the papers into the air.

  “She’s there,” Jessie said. “Right there.”

  Jessie’s observations were lost in the mayhem as a helicopter appeared low overhead, drowning out everything with the sound of chopper blades and blinding everyone with its powerful searchlight. It scanned the top of the car park while the people below shielded their eyes and their candles and tried to continue with the vigil.

  “We will never forget,” the person at the microphone yelled, “that the victims have names, have faces . . . We will take this night back . . .”

  Jessie watched as the woman in the uniform finished throwing the flyers and disappeared. A few minutes later, she walked briskly out of the car park, right past three police officers. Even as it was happening, Jessie was rewriting the story in her mind. It was too odd. The woman must have been a police officer or something like that. She had no idea that she had just seen the British army’s last active soldier from the Second World War, still in her uniform, still defending the East End.

  Jessie looked down at the flyers, which coated the street and were being read by thousands of people and filmed by dozens of television cameras. They read

  THE EYES WILL COME TO YOU

  TERMINUS TERIMNUS

  Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

  —Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man”

  33 />
  WE WERE SITTING IN THE POLICE CAR ACROSS THE street from Regis House. It was one of countless large office buildings in the City of London, maybe ten stories, made of grayish-white stone, full of offices. The front was mostly made of glass, with a large circular overhang in black metal giving its name and address, 45 King William Street. We had dropped Callum off at London Bridge station a few minutes before. Right now, he was making his way under the Thames via a tunnel.

  “We’ll give him ten more minutes,” Stephen said, glancing at the dashboard clock. It was three forty-five.

  Stephen looked out the window and surveyed the street. King William Street led up to London Bridge, and there weren’t many pubs or restaurants on this stretch. The street was deserted except for us. I watched the traffic lights change, the little man on the “walk” sign turn from green to red.

  Once again, it was time to wait. All of London was waiting, silent, as if the population had collectively drawn its breath in anticipation. There wasn’t enough air in the car for me. Something was pressing on my chest. Fear. I tried to keep Jo’s words in my mind—fear couldn’t hurt me. It was a snake with no venom.

  This was no snake. This was a thousand pounds of pressure.

  “Remember how I said I had a boating accident?” Stephen said, breaking my train of thought. “It’s not true.”

  He adjusted something on his tactical vest nervously.

  “When I first met Callum and he asked me what happened, I started to tell him the story, which starts in a boathouse. But then I changed my mind. He just assumed I had a boating accident, and I never corrected him. I’ve said boating accident ever since.”

  “So what really happened?” I asked.

  “My family is fairly wealthy. They aren’t kind, or functional. We may have had a lot of things growing up, but a warm family life wasn’t one of them. When I was fourteen, my older sister died of an overdose. It appeared to be accidental—she was out partying in London. The autopsy showed she had large amounts of both heroin and cocaine in her system. She was seventeen.”