The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  “Right about where you are,” I said.

  “So, quite close. Within ten feet.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your roommate?”

  This was the first time DCI Cole had spoken to me. He was staring at me unblinkingly, judging me, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.

  “Was right here,” I said, pointing up at the window.

  “So she saw him as well.”

  “No,” I said. The queasy feeling got worse.

  “She didn’t see him? But she was right in the window, wasn’t she?”

  “I guess she was just looking at me.”

  DCI Cole bit his upper lip with his lower teeth, looked from me to the window and back again, then waved DI Young to the side and spoke to her quietly. Then he walked away without another word.

  “Let’s go back inside and go through this again,” she said.

  So I returned to the library with Detective Young. I was given a cup of coffee once we sat down, and another officer came over and sat with us. I never got his name, but he typed a lot into a laptop as I spoke. The questions were more detailed this time. How did we get out of the building? Had we been drinking? Did anyone see us leave?

  “We want to do an E-fit,” Detective Young finally said. “Do you know what that is?”

  I shook my head wearily.

  “It’s a way of producing digital images of suspects based on witness reports. Those pictures you see on the news? Those are E-fit pictures. We’re just going to go through your story one more time. You provide us with all the details you can remember. We enter them into a program that creates a digital image of a face, which we can then refine until it looks like the man you say you saw. All right?”

  I didn’t like the way she said “you say you saw,” but I nodded. I was pretty sure at this point that if I went through this again, my head would explode. Nothing seemed real anymore. But they weren’t going to let me go until I did this. So we went through it a third time, this time concentrating solely on the man. We went into even deeper detail—the size of his eyes (medium), the depth of his eyes (deep, I guessed), wrinkles (none, really), the size of his lips (normal), the shape of his eyebrows (slightly arched), his weight (normal, maybe a little thin). It was only when we got to the color of his skin (white) that something stood out.

  “He seemed very . . . gray,” I said. “Kind of pale. Or sick.”

  “So he was a Caucasian man with a pallor?”

  It was more than that, though. His skin and his eyes didn’t match. His eyes were so bright and clear to me, but the rest of him . . . the rest of him hardly seemed to matter. It was like I forgot the rest of his body.

  The E-fit produced something that looked like a cartoon, specifically, like an older, more evil Charlie Brown. In reality, the man’s head wasn’t so smooth. Not that it was lumpy, either, but skulls have textures that are hard to explain.

  Detective Young looked at the image with a resigned expression.

  “All right,” she said. “For now, you should go back to your building. But make sure to stay around today. Don’t leave the campus area.”

  By the time I stepped outside, it was fully daylight and there were television trucks all over the square, pulling up on the sidewalks, taking up every available space. Police officers in bright neon Windbreakers were moving around them, telling drivers to move, pointing camera people away from the school. A female reporter immediately descended on me.

  “Were you in there talking to the police?” she asked.

  “I just saw a guy,” I mumbled.

  “You saw someone?”

  “I—”

  “What exactly did you see?” Suddenly, there were two cameras in my face, blinding me with their lights. I was about to answer when two police officers hurried over, one sticking her hand over the camera lens.

  “You lot, you stop filming now,” she barked. “I want to see all your footage—”

  “We have every right—”

  “You,” the other officer said to me, “get back to your house.”

  As I hurried off, the cameras followed me, and the reporter called, “What’s your name? Your name?”

  I didn’t answer. Call Me Claudia was standing in the door of Hawthorne, and this time, I was happy to see her. As I left, I was sure that the cameras trained on my fleeing figure got some really excellent footage of my butt hustling through the rain in my alligator pajamas.

  14

  JAZZA WAS PACING OUR ROOM WHEN I RETURNED. She had her pink piggy mug out, which was the tea mug she reserved for times of extreme stress.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked. “You were gone for ages!”

  “It was fine,” I said. “They just asked me a lot of questions.”

  Jazza didn’t ask if I’d said anything about her. Instead, she waved me over to the window.

  “I can’t believe this is happening. Just look out there.”

  We both knelt on the spare bed we had pushed against the wall and were using as a sofa. It was right under our middle window. Through the rain-streaked glass, we saw the white-suited figures coming in and out of the white tent. More lights were set up. More people arrived. More cameras and police and police tape.

  This activity remained the focus of the next few hours, with the occasional break to drink tea. Since the view from our room was so good, lots of people from the other side of the hall came in to have a look. The view out the windows was actually a lot more interesting than the news—in fact, it was the news. The news cameras filmed our buildings and the little tent until the police moved them back and set up a cordon around the campus, stranding us on a little island of activity.

  Eventually, we all found ourselves crowded into the common room, staring at the television. Every once in a while, the news would fill us in on some aspect of what was going on outside. The victim was female again. Her name was Catherine Lord. She worked at a pub in the City. She had last been seen leaving after they closed at midnight. A coworker had walked her to her car. CCTV had caught her car pulling away. Footage from various traffic cameras tracked her from there. She had not driven home. Instead, she had driven to the location of the fourth murder. Her empty car had been found three streets away from Wexford, and while there was a partial CCTV record of her walking away from it, no one could explain what she was doing or where she was going. The news showed a picture of her, taken earlier that evening. Catherine Lord had been beautiful, with bright strawberry blond hair, and she looked barely older than us. She wore a white Victorian-style dress with a tight bodice and lots of lace. Her pub had been hosting a Ripper night special, and she and all the other bar staff were in costume. The news couldn’t get enough of this—a pretty girl in a Victorian dress. The perfect victim.

  That girl had died just outside my door. It was possible she was still in that white tent. Her dress would no longer be white.

  “Julianne,” Claudia said, appearing at the door, “come here, please.”

  Jazza looked at me, then stood and went out of the room. She was still gone when we were all taken over to lunch as a group soon after. It was absolutely pouring now, but that didn’t slow down any of the activity outside. The police had moved the media away. We could see them all huddled down at the end of the street, held off by a few police officers. They had their cameras trained on us, beckoning us to come closer. To combat this, the school was making a bunch of teachers stand out in the rain and haul anyone back who wanted to go be on television. The police had more or less taken over the streets and the square. It was now a given that we would only be permitted to go from our dorms to the dining hall or library. Any attempt to walk in any other direction was met by flailing arms and a shooing motion.

  The dining hall staff, to their credit, had risen to the occasion and had cooked not only for us, but for the police outside. There were extra urns of hot coffee and tea, trays of muffins and sandwiches, as well as the usual offerings.
Today, it was some kind of limp pasta with a pink sauce, a stewlike thing of lamb and peas, and a tray of hamburgers. I had no appetite at all, but I grabbed one just to have something on my tray. Andrew and Jerome were already there, and they waved me over to sit with them.

  “Where’s Jazza?” Andrew asked.

  “Talking to Claudia, or . . . someone. I’m not sure.”

  Jerome looked at me. He had undoubtedly already done the “we crossed the square at the same time the murder happened” math, or maths as they insisted on calling it here. He looked at my untouched burger, and I think he knew—not exactly what had happened, but certainly that something wasn’t good.

  Jazza joined us a few minutes later.

  “All right?” Jerome asked.

  “Fine,” she said, a fake breeziness in her voice. “It’s all fine.”

  After a half hour, we were all herded up again, the girls first. Outside, the police parade was still going on. A third mobile forensics unit van had joined the two that had been here most of the morning, and there were police with plastic rain slickers on walking the green in a long line—about thirty of them—taking every step together, examining the ground as they went.

  As we came up to Hawthorne, there was a policeman standing in the middle of the road outside. He was tall and very young-looking, with black glasses. His face was long and thin, with pronounced cheekbones and long hollows under them. Even though he had the fluorescent green police jacket and the signature high black helmet and all the stuff that said POLICE, he didn’t seem like a policeman. His black hair was just a little too long, his face a little too fresh, his bearing a little too self-conscious.

  “Miss Deveaux?” He said my name elegantly, like someone who knew French and knew where the proper emphasis should be. He said my name way better than I did, that was for sure. And his voice was surprisingly deep.

  “Um,” I said. I had gotten a lot less articulate since I woke up that morning. He didn’t seem to care what I replied. He knew exactly who I was, and he barreled right on.

  “And you’re Julianne Benton? Her roommate?”

  “Yes,” Jazza said, in her smallest of tiny voices.

  “You were together last night at two A.M.?”

  “Yes,” we said, at the same time.

  “You saw a man?” he asked me.

  “Yes. I told—”

  “And you didn’t,” he said to Jazza. It wasn’t a question. “You’re sure?”

  “No, I . . . no.”

  “Even though he was directly in front of you?”

  “I . . . No. I . . . No . . .”

  Jazza was fumbling. The way this guy was saying it, it was like she had failed a test.

  “Both of you,” he said. “Don’t speak to anyone from the press. If they approach you, walk away. Don’t give your name. Do not repeat anything you told the detective this morning. If you need assistance, phone this number.”

  He handed me a small piece of paper with a phone number written on it.

  “Phone it any time you need assistance, day or night,” he said. “And if you ever see that man again, even if you just think you see him, you call that number.”

  He turned and walked away. Jazza and I wasted no time in running into the building, right up the stairs, and into our room. I slammed the door behind us.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “They just took me and . . . they asked me about what we did . . . and I told them about how we went out and went to the roof . . . and they didn’t care about that, really . . . They wanted to know about the man . . . but I didn’t see the man . . . I don’t know how I didn’t see him, but I didn’t, and that’s all they wanted to know about, and I couldn’t tell them anything so . . . oh, God.”

  She dropped onto her bed. I sat next to her.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “You did fine. They promised we wouldn’t get in trouble.”

  “I don’t care about that! I don’t understand how I didn’t see him. And who was that? That policeman? He didn’t look like a policeman. He looked our age. Can you be our age and be a policeman? I suppose you can, but . . . he doesn’t look like one, does he? Though, I suppose . . . I suppose policemen don’t look like any particular kind of person, but still. He doesn’t look like one, does he?”

  No. He didn’t look like a policeman. Policemen were supposed to look . . . not like him. He did look young. More than that, he looked a little too well kept, with fancy designer glasses and smooth, pale skin.

  Jazza took the card from my hand and examined it.

  “This is a mobile number,” she said. “Shouldn’t a police card have the number of a main switchboard or something? Shouldn’t you just dial 999 if there’s a problem? I’ll bet you he’s a reporter. He has to be a reporter. It’s illegal to masquerade as a policeman.”

  None of this was helping my queasy feeling. I began to pace.

  “I think you should go back to the library and report what just happened,” she said.

  “I don’t really want to go back out there right now.”

  We had a few moments of independent fretting, then Jazza got up with a determined look on her face.

  “If Claudia suspects something, that we went out, she might tell Charlotte. Charlotte’s her minion.”

  “So? Charlotte doesn’t know we went out.”

  “But she knows about the window bars in the toilet. Come on.”

  I followed Jazza back downstairs, where she proceeded to the bathroom in what I suspect was supposed to be a very stealthy way. It was a little more rabbitlike, with quick moves and nervous glances. She dashed into the bathroom and, once she checked to make sure it was empty, went right to the window, opened it, and gave the bars a shake. They were firmly bolted again.

  Jazza gripped the bars until her knuckles went white and closed the window.

  “I hate her,” she said.

  Even I wasn’t sure that it was fair to blame Charlotte for the fact that someone had become aware of the window bars. But Jazza needed to blame Charlotte. It was important for the balance of her mind. Someone had to be blamed if we went down for this, and I was glad it wasn’t me.

  “We’re having tea,” she said calmly. “And we are not going to get upset. I am going to make the tea.”

  With that, she strode back upstairs. She grabbed two mugs off the shelf above her desk and two tea bags from her jar of special tea bags. I left her to it, pulled my robe on over my clothes, and went to the window. Outside, the line of police was still marching down the green. They stretched from one side to the other, no more than two feet apart. The only area they avoided was the part with the white tent, which had its own staff searching the ground. They were quite literally looking at every single inch of the green.

  Last night felt like it had happened years before.

  And then I noticed that right below our building, down on the cobblestone street, was the young policeman. He was staring right at my window, right at me. Jazza was right. He couldn’t be a policeman. He looked really young. Yet, there he was, standing around in the middle of half the police in London. You would think that they would notice if there was a fake policeman in their midst.

  I made eye contact with him, making sure he knew I saw him. He quickly walked away.

  15

  THE WHITE TENT WAS THERE ALL DAY SUNDAY. It glowed at dusk, when it was illuminated by dozens of high-powered work lights. The press was there too, hovering on the edges of campus, watching. The school sent around an e-mail saying how really, really safe it all was, even though there was a homicide investigation going on on the green at that very second, and several psychologists were being called in to talk to anyone who felt like they needed support.

  And people were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back at home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford, some people just aggressively pretended nothing was happening. Eloise, for example, sat in
her room and smoked and read French novels. Charlotte patrolled the halls, poking her big red head into our rooms. Angela and Gaenor drank their way through a small crate of wine bottles they’d smuggled in, staggering into our room at points with mugs full of red wine. One of them hung a pink bra from our lighting fixture. I left it there. It was a nice bra.

  At night, you could hear high-pitched nervous chatter through our halls. No one could sleep, so everyone talked. I think things were largely the same over at Aldshot. Most of the guys showed up at breakfast with red eyes with deep shadows under them, indicating either lots of reading or lots of booze.

  My parents tried to put me on a train to Bristol, but I insisted that I had to stay, that we were perfectly safe. And we were, really. We were knee-deep in police and all of our movements were recorded. They eventually accepted this, but they also called every two hours or so. My entire family called. Uncle Bick and Cousin Diane called several times. Miss Gina called. And then there were the e-mails. Everyone from Bénouville wanted the story. I spent most of Sunday holding a phone in one hand and typing with the other.

  I didn’t mention to anyone that I had actually seen the killer. It was hard to keep this fact quiet. I had the best gossip on the planet, and yet I could say nothing. I was still the Only Witness in the Case, and at any moment, Scotland Yard was going to yank me in and quiz me for hours. Then everyone would know who I was. I’d be all over the news.

  I waited for them to come and ask me more questions. But no one came. The news never mentioned a witness. And we never heard a word from Claudia about what we may or may not have been up to on the night of the murder. Wexford was true to its word. If they knew we’d gone to the roof, they were giving us a pass.

  Classes were canceled on Monday morning, by which point there was a definite funk in the air in Hawthorne. I don’t want to say the building stank, but there was a closeness. The heaters were on full blast, the air was thick with moisture and stress hormones. On Monday afternoon, they allowed us to go to class and to the library, but our movements were strictly controlled. We had to stick to the cobblestone path at all times. They put up nylon barriers on the edge of the green so that we couldn’t see the tent as easily—but we still had a pretty clear view from any second-story window.