The Madness Underneath

“Around the Great Fire. Maybe just before and after?”

“Well,” she said, “in that period, this area would have been just outside the boundaries of the London Wall. Quite literally just outside of. Bishopsgate was a boundary street. There would certainly have been a number of fields. Henry the Eighth also used the area to store artillery and train soldiers. That’s why the streets have the names they do—Gun Street, Artillery Lane.”

“Are there maps?”

“We don’t have much of a cartography section, but there is quite a collection at the British Library.”

“Is that far?”

“Not at all. It’s just next to King’s Cross station.”

Having tanked my pretest, I still had three hours left to kill in the afternoon. If I hurried, I could probably be there within a half an hour or so.

The words British Library call to mind something ancient. I was expecting a grand old building. Instead, it was a modern place, with lots of interactive screens, weird tables with “stand-up chairs,” which were essentially boards you could lean against and work standing up, and swish cafés.

It turned out there were multiple map rooms, but to access them, I first had to go downstairs to a room full of lockers, where we had to leave our coats, all liquids, and all pens. Everything we were going to carry with us (money, computers, paper, pencils) had to go in a clear plastic shopping bag. Then I had to get a library ID card. Then I had to go online and spend half an hour trying to figure out what I needed. Then I had to order it. I put in the request and was told that my maps would be available in about an hour to an hour and a half, so I walked around for a while and watched other people study. I obsessively checked my status, waiting for the message telling me that my map had come. Finally, it arrived. I was handed a stack of massive, flat portfolios, like huge folders, which I gingerly carried over to one of the nearby tables. I opened up all the flaps of the first one, revealing a single page inside. It looked almost new, yet it was from 1658, and they were letting me touch it.

It was a close-up view of London back when London took up mostly just a single mile along the Thames, encased by a wall. The artist had drawn ships sailing down the Thames, rows of houses, and arches all along the London wall. (These were the actual “gates” of the wall, and their names still existed: Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Moorgate…I knew all of these places.) I had to look close, but I could see windmills and trees and even tiny little people. There were fields in places I knew to be bustling parts of East London.

And there was Artillery Lane, spelled here “Artillerie Lane,” the very street that ran along Wexford, where the Royal Gunpowder was located. It was next to something called the Artillerie Garden. I looked this one up quickly online—it was a munitions storehouse and training ground for the military. Just across Bishopsgate, in a little warren of buildings, I saw the word Bedlam.

I’d heard that before. My grandmother used it a lot to mean insane. Like, when her two little dogs heard the can opener going, her kitchen became Bedlam.

I looked up Bedlam. Bedlam—the Bethlehem Royal Hospital. One of the world’s first psychiatric facilities, except what all the information described hardly sounded like compassionate medical care. There were manacles and chains and all forms of restraints, buckets of water, cold and terrifying cells. The public could even come in and pay to see the patients. It was a human zoo. Mad preachers shouted from the windows and gained devoted followings. Brilliant but sick patients drew elaborate diagrams of mind-controlling machines. The hospital had been in several locations, but for quite a while, it was that tiny tower with the flag, which sat where Liverpool Street station is now.

Wexford was practically on top of it.

Now my mind was moving swiftly. If the hospital had been there, presumably many people had died there. Presumably they needed to be buried. I looked up “Bedlam burials” and was rewarded instantly with many hits. Current Archaeology had a front cover story called “Bedlam Burials.” There was a picture of a skeleton neatly packed in the dirt, being unearthed. I turned up more articles on lots of skeletons being uncovered. They’d found them in 1863, when they were building Broad Street station, which was long gone, but had been close by. And in 1911, they found piles and piles more when they were tunneling their way to Liverpool Street.

We were sitting right on top of the graveyard of the world’s most infamous mental institution, which is arguably many hundreds of times worse than being on top of the old haunted burial grounds that things are always being built on in America. Loads of mad ghosts…who might be disturbed by, say, a major explosion that might have, quite possibly, opened up some kind of crack that they could pass through? And they might, for instance, kill people with hammers…

Now I had a reason to call Stephen.

Stephen wasn’t answering his phone. I tried several times as I ran back to the Tube and wound my way through the insane King’s Cross rush-hour traffic in an attempt to get back to Wexford before anyone noticed I had gone. I got home fifteen minutes before dinner. Jazza was sitting on her bed, looking like a small child who’d just seen a wolf eat her pet bunny.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s my favorite roommate?”

“Have I told you that I’m wretched at German?”

“You tell me that daily,” I said. “But I don’t believe you.”

“Well, I’m not good enough for someone applying to study German.”

“But you’re good enough for me, and isn’t that what counts?”

“Not really. I’m going to fail.”

I had no idea how she was doing in German, but I doubted she was going to fail. I was going to fail. I was the failure of our room.

“Do you have any Cheez Whiz?”

Things had to be bad if she wanted predinner Cheez Whiz.

“Do I have any Cheez Whiz? She asks stupid questions, my roommate. Heater or microwave?”

“Microwave.”

While I was in Bristol, I had been sent three jars of my favorite substance on earth. I took one of them from my bottom desk drawer. I was carrying the cheezy goodness back down the hall when Charlotte materialized from the direction of the fire doors.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Are you keeping up with everything okay?”

I couldn’t say yes to this and keep a straight face. Plus, from the way she curled up the question at the end, I got the distinct impression that Charlotte already knew the score.

“It’s an ongoing process,” I said, sticking the jar into the microwave.

“That’s a great way of looking at it. I heard you saw Jane. She’s great, isn’t she?”

“She’s good,” I said.

We both watched the jar revolve slowly.

“Is she helping you?”

“I just went the once.”

“Well, she’s really great, I think. I think you already look better.”

The microwave beeped, and I opened it up.

“I’m glad,” I said. I smiled and maneuvered around her to get back to my room. I liked Jane too, but there was something deeply unnerving in the way Charlotte liked her. Charlotte liked Jane too much. I didn’t even know what that meant, or why it was a problem.

Maybe I had therapy jealousy.

I stuck my finger into the container and helped myself to a bit of the cheez, only to scald myself. I quickly put it in my mouth and bounced open the door with my elbow.

“Is Charlotte kind of creepy?” I asked Jazza, kicking the door shut behind me.

“Creepy how?”

“Just…creepy. I don’t know. Creepy.”

“It’s not the first word I would use to describe her.”

Jazza was digging around in her tuck chest for a suitable snack with which to consume the Cheez Whiz. Cheez Whiz is a very forgiving food—you just need something slightly more stable than Cheez Whiz to eat it with. I have been known to eat it with slices of actual cheese.

“Is she different, though? Since the attack?”

“Definitely different,” Jazza said. “A little nicer, but in an unctuous way. She wants to help all the time. I don’t need her help. Is that what you mean by creepy?”

“I think so,” I said.

“I suppose that’s good,” Jazza said, sighing a little. She could never be mean for more than a minute or two at a time, then something clicked inside her. “I know she’s going to therapy. It must be helping. I mean, I know she was hurt. But you were hurt worse.”

That was true. I really was. I was holding on to the title.

My phone was ringing, and Stephen’s name came up. I had to answer this, but I couldn’t answer it in front of Jazza, and this was going to be a problem. We didn’t leave the room to answer phone calls. But I had no choice in the matter, and bounced up with a quick “Be right back!”

“Where have you been?” I said.

“Doing my job. What’s wrong?”

I hurried down the hall and stood in the vestibule between the fire doors. This was as close to privacy as I was going to get.

“I don’t have long,” I said. “I’m in my building. People around.”

I launched into what I had discovered. He didn’t interrupt me. I went through all my notes. The location of Bedlam, how far it was from Wexford, the burial pit discovery. He listened to it all, and somehow, though he was totally silent, I knew I was catching his interest. Stephen liked research. He liked map reference numbers and dates and the word cartography.

“All right,” he said. “You’re right. It’s worth knowing.”

“What would you normally do next?”

“Talk to the suspect.”

“Okay. So let’s do that.”

“The suspect in question is in a mental health facility under close guard.”

Jazza waved to me and began to approach.

“Have to go,” I said. “Can you just…”

“All right,” he said, sighing a little. “I’ll look into it.”

I was in French on Friday when my phone vibrated in my pocket. I managed to slide it out and hide it in my lap, in the folds of my skirt. It was a message from Stephen.

Going to speak with suspect in Royal Gunpowder incident tomorrow morning.

I had long mastered the art of typing texts with one finger without really looking. Well, without looking much.

What time are you picking me up?

His response was quick:

Picking you up for what?

I’m going with you.

Out of the question.

My teacher was looking in my direction now. I quickly pressed the phone between my thighs, vanishing it.

“Let me just cover the things you’ve been able to do so far,” I said. The minute I got out of class, I had called Stephen. I was not giving up on this. I paced the green with the phone to my ear. The middle of the green was actually the safest place to talk. Too many people along the edges. “You convinced my therapist that she had to let me come back to school. You busted into my school’s security system. You arranged for me to be taken to a Tube station in the middle of the night to do a show for Thorpe—”

“Rory—”

“Not to mention all the stuff I don’t know about. Oh, and covering up the entire Ripper case with a fake dead body?”

“I didn’t do that,” he said.

“You know what I mean. You can arrange it so I can go.”

“Rory, this is a facility for the criminally insane. A medium secure unit. This man has confessed to murder. This is serious.”

“And the other things we’ve dealt with weren’t serious?”

“Of course they were serious,” he said. “But—”

“Let me ask you this,” I cut in. “If there is something in that basement, and it needs to be taken care of, who’s going to do it? Who’s the terminus? Me. And if you want the terminus to behave, you have to take me.”

I surprised myself with this last one. It was very blunt. I think it shocked him into silence.

“I’ll get in touch with you later,” he said.

And he did. The reply came as I was walking home from dinner.

I’ll pick you up around the corner from Wexford at 9:45 tomorrow. Sharp. Wear plain white shirt and black trousers or skirt. -s

13

THERE WAS ONLY ONE SMALL PROBLEM WITH THIS OTHERwise flawless plan: I was supposed to be in art history at the same time we were going to the hospital. I am not, as a general rule, a class skipper. I’d only ever done it once, and that was entirely by accident. It had happened the year before, back at home. I was running late for school and didn’t have time for coffee. No coffee in the morning makes Rory a stupid girl. For all of first period, I battled to keep my eyes open. In second period, I thought it was third period. So instead of going to second-period French, I went to third-period study hall and went to sleep in the corner of the library, where they have this deflated fuzzy beanbag that no one wants to use because someone claimed there were bed bugs in it. I woke to find myself being shaken by the librarian. They’d realized I was missing from French and put out one of those school-wide Amber-alert things my school does. They track you down. I got a moron reprimand.

Wexford was a different sort of place. They didn’t follow you around. For my own conscience, I justified this in several ways: 1. Saturday art class was kind of a weird add-on class that wasn’t quite like the other classes. It wasn’t an extracurricular, but it didn’t have that “real class” feel. I may have entirely made this one up, but that was the way it appeared to me. 2. No idea what was going on anyway, so missing one more class would not hurt. 3. Mark was a cool guy and would probably figure I was getting some kind of treatment or therapy. He wasn’t regular faculty, so he wouldn’t have known my whole story or hung out much with the other teachers. 4. I had better things to do: namely, go to a mental hospital and talk to a murderer. That had to be way more important than me examining the works of the puddles and puffy clouds painters.

I should explain myself to Jerome, at least. He would wonder. He would worry. Would he worry? That was cute.

Or he’d think I had overslept and missed class. Much more likely.

I would worry about excuses later.

I cobbled together an outfit with one of my uniform shirts, and I planned on stealing a skirt out of Jazza’s closet the second she left the room. All I had to do was get out of the building and around the corner without being seen by the wrong people. The wrong people, in descending order of importance, were Jerome, Jazza, my teacher Mark, most of the people on my hall, and my art history classmates. I couldn’t go too early—Jazza would notice if I woke up and left before her (and I needed the skirt). The perfect time, I decided, was nine thirty. Most people went to breakfast then. I could slip out and no one would be the wiser.

Except that morning, everyone decided to switch things up. Jazza lingered in our room. Gaenor came over to borrow shampoo. Eloise came by to talk. And then, when the coast was finally clear, I found my escape route blocked by Claudia, who felt that this was clearly the moment when the bulletin board in the lobby needed cleaning off. She would not move.

9:30 came and went. Then 9:35. Then 9:40. By 9:41, I went into a slight panic, which set off a brain wave. We had a house phone on every hallway, with emergency numbers listed next to it, along with Claudia’s office phone. I called her, left the phone off the hook, and when she went into her office to answer, I ran through the lobby and out the door. At this point, I was in real danger of being seen by people heading to class, but there was nothing I could do about that. I could only hope that by running and by not being in a uniform, I would confuse people enough that they wouldn’t realize it was me. This seemed extremely unlikely, but I am prepared to lie to myself on occasion to make life more palatable.

I hate to run, as I think I have mentioned, but I ran that morning. I ran like a thing that runs, almost running directly into people as I took the corner onto the busy shopping street. For a moment, I thought Stephen had left without me or not come at all, because there was a smug little red Smart Car in his usual spot, but then I saw the police car across the street. I continued my run right across the street.

“Made it,” I said, getting in and clicking the seat belt triumphantly into place.

I don’t think Stephen considered successfully getting into a car by nine forty-five—well, nine forty-seven—in the morning to be a major triumph. He just didn’t understand how complicated my life was.

“Don’t look so happy to see me,” I said.

“Put this on.” He handed me what looked like a black bowler hat with a white-and-black-checked band around it. There was a fluorescent-yellow police jacket as well.

“Why?”

“Because you’re riding in the front. You have to look like you belong. Put it on.”

I slapped on the hat and put on the jacket. They were both just a touch large, but not too bad. At least these were for women. I’d worn Callum’s before, and those were huge. There was a heady plasticky-rubber smell coming off the jacket, and it still had square folds all over it, like it had just come out of a package. I examined myself in the side view mirror. I looked…not exactly like a policewoman, but not entirely unlike one.

“I like this. Can we turn on the siren?”

“Stop it,” he said.

There was a stiffness to his whole demeanor that suggested he had not liked my ultimatum. He was taking me, but he was angry.

“Do you realize the sort of place we’re going to?” he said.

“I realize we’re going to a mental hospital.”

“To meet a murderer.”

“I’ve met a murderer before.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s probably why I agreed to this. I think. It’s a good thing Callum’s taking Boo over to the hospital to have her cast removed—I didn’t have to make any excuses about where I was going.”

It was a miserable morning, overcast as ever. The car’s windows had fogged up from the moisture, and the windshield wipers beat back the gloom and the almost imperceptible rain.

“I understand you and Callum went out the other night,” he said.

“He told you?”

“He didn’t. Boo did.”

“He wasn’t supposed to tell Boo either,” I said.

“He didn’t. Boo just knew.”

“How?”

“Boo is very observant,” he said. “She always seems to know what we’ve been doing. She said Callum was ‘glowing,’ which I suppose means that he looks very happy after he’s been patrolling.”

“Or he’s pregnant,” I said.

Stephen let this pass.

“Well, since you’re going on official business, here is the background: The victim, Charlie Strong, was a recovered alcoholic. He continued to run his pub after he stopped drinking, but had a policy of hiring people who were in recovery as a way of supporting the process. Sam Worth, the suspect, had such a history, and a recent one. History of Class A drug use, two charges of possession. He was jailed for two years for beating a man half to death with a metal chair. He was high on acid at the time and thought the man was trying to steal his ears.”

“Steal his ears?”

“Apparently Sam took quite a lot of drugs. So he has form.”

“Form?”

“Form…a past. A criminal record. History of drug use, history of violence. No drugs were found in his system at the time of arrest, though. He claimed innocence at the scene, but changed his plea once he was in the cells. A week ago, he attempted self-harm or suicide by beating his head against a wall until he was bloody and concussed. That’s when he was transferred to a mental health facility. What they’re trying to determine now is whether he’s fit for trial. So that’s where things stand.”

On that cheery note, Stephen went silent. There was a throbbingly pink advertisement on the bus in front of us for a musical called Foot-tastic. It featured a photo of a man and a woman who were smiling so hard, I had the feeling that their skin might just unzip and fall off their skulls.

“I’m going to fail everything,” I said, just for a change of subject.

“You don’t sound overly concerned about that.”

“Just keeping it in perspective,” I said coolly. “I’ve dealt with worse recently.”

“True,” he said. “But you have to move on.”

“I have moved on.”

“I mean, you need school.”

“Are you giving me a stay-in-school lecture? Is that what’s happening here?”

“I’m not giving you any lecture—your marks are your problem.”

Maybe it was best if we didn’t talk right now. The occasion wasn’t really one that invited carefree banter, and when I just keep talking, things often got weird fast. It was time for quiet now.

The Royal Bethlehem Hospital didn’t look like a mental hospital, not that I have much experience on the subject. It was brick, very American looking, like an administrative building on a college campus or something from Main Street, Anywhere, USA. Big windows, red roof, tiny square turret on top. It was cheerful and efficient, even if it was draped entirely in cobwebs of fog. We parked right out front, in a space reserved for official vehicles.

“Here is how this will work,” Stephen said, turning the car off. “This man is accused of murder. Remember that. I will do the talking. Are we clear?”

“Crystal,” I said.

“Even if people ask you questions, you do not answer. They can’t hear your accent.”

“Got it.”

“Close up the coat and keep the hat on. Look like you’re meant to be here. Technically, you are impersonating a police officer, so we have to do this right.”

Everything was fine until we actually went through the front door.

I call it “water park feeling.” I always think I want to go to water parks. The idea of going on a water slide always seems like a good one. I like pools; therefore, it follows that I should like a park made of pools. And every summer, without fail, I make this mistake and end up going to Splash World, where I remember that I hate water parks, because they are not about pools—they are about slides. They are about heights. They are often about slides that reach to great heights that are enclosed, and as any shipwreck survivor would be happy to tell you, water and enclosed spaces are bad combinations. Add to that the free-fall aspect, and you have a combination that the reptile part of the brain abhors. The brain says no. The brain says bad. The brain says you will fall and then you will drown, or possibly both at the same time.

I know it the minute I approach the turnstiles and buy a ticket, because that’s when you can smell the chlorine. As soon as it hits my nose, my reptile brain wakes up, checks the files, and sends up the warning. And this is why I always end up claiming I have cramps and holding the towels while gleeful children run around me, totally unafraid.

On this particular morning, it wasn’t chlorine I smelled. But as we walked through the front door, I caught the faint bite of antiseptic and the strange and false odor of recycled air that comes from a place with no open windows. Hospital smell.

We started at the front desk. From there, we were taken to a series of stations through a series of doors that had to be opened with swipe cards. Stephen had to show something called a warrant card, which turned out to be his police identification. He signed documents on clipboards.

I could tell, as we progressed through the building, that we were moving to more and more serious levels. In the beginning, there were paintings on the walls, paintings done by the patients. At first, the paintings just hung. Then they were bolted. Then they were gone and the walls were a plain off-white and everything else was a soothing light green. Everything was calm, orderly, and official.

Finally, after some last papers were signed, we were taken to a room with a heavy door, with large, very serious bolts on the outside and a tiny window just big enough to peep in. We were let inside, and the door was locked behind us.

My first impression of the man at the table was that he was big. He had a few days’ scraggly beard, which was blondish-gray. He was dressed in the hospital-issued clothes, which looked like scrubs. His hands were cuffed together on the table, but this didn’t feel necessary. He slumped in his chair, looking feeble and defeated. There were cuts and bruises on his forehead from where he’d banged it into a wall.

The room was bare except for a few bolted-down chairs and the bolted-down table. There was a CCTV camera in the corner of the room, behind a protective coating of thick plastic, with just a circle cut out to expose the lens. Stephen looked at the camera for a moment. The red light on the side suddenly blinked and went off. No cameras. This was a private interview.

There were two chairs on either side of the table, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to sit next to Stephen, or if this was his job and I was supposed to hang back.

“I’m Constable Dene,” Stephen said. “And this is WPC Devon.”

I guess my real last name, Deveaux, was too distinctive, and Devon sounded more English.

Sam raised his head slightly.

“Constable?” he said.

“I realize you’ve probably been talking to a number of people of a much higher rank.”

“Done talking. I’ve told you lot already.”

“And I realize you might not want to tell your story again,” Stephen went on. “I realize you’ve had to tell many people, but we’re going to need you to tell us again.”

“You afraid to sit down?” Sam asked me.

Actually, yes. I was terrified of sitting down. How nice of him to notice.

“PC Devon,” Stephen said, without turning around, “why don’t you sit down?”

Now all the attention was on me, and it was possible that nothing would go forward if I didn’t peel myself off the wall and sit in the chair. I was, I reminded myself, not a trained police officer or mental health professional or anything like that. I was a high school student, a foreigner, and someone who had gotten into all of this completely by accident, and it was not my responsibility to be big and brave here. But I had demanded to be here.

I unstuck myself from the wall and planted myself in the plastic chair. I put my hands in my lap, where they were safe from germs and whatever else it was I feared in this room.

Now we could continue.

“I know this is difficult for you,” Stephen said, “but it would be helpful, and you’ve been very cooperative. We know that.”

Sam sighed—an all-body sigh that rounded his shoulders.

“I don’t want to. I’m tired.”

Sam’s chin sunk into his chest, and he examined the locks that bound him to the table.

“In your own time,” Stephen said. “We’re not here to bring you any trouble. We’re here to listen.”

Sam turned his attention to me. His eyes had a yellowy cast.

“You’re not police,” he said. “Are you?”

“WPC Devon is an observer from our Care in the Community division,” Stephen said. “I’ll be asking the—”

“You’re not,” Sam said. “I don’t think either of you are police.”

Stephen produced his warrant card, opened it, and slid it across the table. Sam leaned forward to have a look at it.

“And where’s hers?” Sam said.

“She doesn’t carry one in her capacity,” Stephen said smoothly.

“Why doesn’t she talk?”

Sam had clearly figured me out. Of course I wasn’t a cop. A small child or a dog could have figured that out. I guess I thought that since Stephen came up with the idea, it might actually work.

“She’s an observer,” Stephen said again. “If her presence upsets you, she can go into the hallway and we can talk alone.”

“I want to know who she is,” Sam said.

There didn’t seem any point in playing this game any more.

“I’m Rory,” I said.

“You’re American,” Sam replied.

Stephen didn’t make a noise, but I could see the sigh shrugging through his frame.

“Who are you?” Sam asked. “How did you get in here?”

“I’m here because bad things have happened to me.”

That got his interest.

“What kind of bad things?”

Stephen cleared his throat loudly. “I don’t think this is—”

“What kind of bad things?” Sam said again. His eyes were locked on me. This man was supposed to have murdered someone with a hammer. Being here, talking…these were possibly not the best ideas I’d ever had. But talking is still my thing, and talking was better than not talking.

“I was stabbed,” I said. “At Wexford.”

“You’re that Ripper girl,” Sam said. “They said it was an American girl. She’s the Ripper girl.”

That last one was to Stephen, who was forced to nod.

“Why did you bring the Ripper girl here?”

We were so far off track now that Stephen had no immediate reply to this quite reasonable question.

“You saw the news reports,” Stephen said, after a moment. “Do you remember how the suspect was never caught on CCTV?”

These words had an immediate effect on Sam. His arms went slack, and the restraints clanked against the table. The rest of his body became more alert.

“I think something in that cellar wasn’t quite right,” Stephen said.

Sam shook his head, as if he had water in his ear that he needed to dislodge. “No,” he said.

“Sam, I don’t think you wanted to hurt Charlie. Did you hurt Charlie?”

“I already said I did!”

“But did you?”

Sam began to cry. Tears dribbled down his face, getting stuck in the stubble. He turned his head back and forth as if trying to shake his face dry.

“What was in that cellar, Sam?” Stephen pressed on. “Why did you call Charlie down there?”

“I did it…”

“Sam.” Stephen’s voice had taken on a deep, steady tone that was kind of hypnotic. “Sam, you called him downstairs. Why?”

“The floor. I just wanted to show him the floor…”

“What about the floor?”

“The cross,” he said.

“What cross?”

“When I went down for the tonic water, there was no cross on the floor. But then when I went back down again for the crisps, there it was.”

“The cross?”

“It was drawn in chalk,” Sam said. “I thought there was something wrong with my head. And I got near it, and suddenly this glass came out of nowhere, like it had been thrown at me. I yelled for Charlie…”

I realized my nails were digging into my thighs.

“Charlie thought I was on something, but I wasn’t. I didn’t take nothing, I promise. And I was trying to tell him that…”

Sam had started to shake, an all-over quiver that rattled his arms and pulled on the restraints that bound him to the table. Tears trickled freely from his eyes.

“What happened next, Sam?” Stephen asked quietly.

Sam shook his head.

“Sam,” he said, “we will believe you.”

“I don’t want you to believe me.”

It was horrible to watch, this tormented man, chained into place.

“Charlie started to wipe the cross away,” he said. “He was down on his knees and saying, ‘We’ll just clean this up and have a cup of tea and we’ll talk…’ He thought I was high and things were going bad in my head. And then, the hammer…It did it on its own. I promise you, it went right for him, on its own. Right through the air. I didn’t believe what I was seeing. I would have stopped it, but I didn’t understand what was going on…but that didn’t happen, did it? The hammer didn’t move by itself. I must’ve done it. It was just me and him, and I picked up the hammer when it fell to the floor, and…it must have been me. I must’ve killed him. I must have—”

He broke down entirely, his body shuddering. He was chained to the table and weeping in agony.

Stephen stood and indicated that I should as well.

“You’ve done the right thing, telling us. This is a good place. They’ll look after you here.”

Sam turned away from us to face the wall, and the tears streamed hard and fast again. His sobs filled the room, and the air got thick and humid. The horror of it all was in this room, in sweat and tears and adrenaline—the pain of a mind rejecting something that seemed unnatural, something that had no place in this world. Something violent that had no face or body.

“Sam.” Stephen’s voice had gone very soft, softer than I had imagined it could go. “You’ll be looked after. You don’t need to be afraid.”

“I did it,” Sam moaned. “I did it. I must have. Please tell me. Please. Please tell me what’s happening…”

“What’s happening…” Stephen paused and looked for something to say. But how did you explain a thing like this to a man who’d seen his boss die right in front of him? A man who believed he committed a murder, and was now in a hospital chained to a table?

“I’ll speak to someone outside,” Stephen said. “They’ll give you something. It will be all right. You will get all the help you need. Thank you for talking to us.”

He nodded to me, and I stood up slowly and we left the room.

14

I DIDN’T EXACTLY RUN OUT OF THE HOSPITAL WHEN WE finished, but I came pretty close. Once we were outside, I tipped back my head. The drizzle went up my nose, along with the smell of wet leaves in a parking lot. I loved everything about this wet parking lot. I loved the fog that smothered the landscape. It wasn’t the hospital itself that was bad. It was a perfectly nice and modern hospital—it was that it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

“I told you it wouldn’t be pleasant,” Stephen said.

“I’m fine,” I replied.

Stephen took me at my word. We returned to the car, but he didn’t start the engine right away.

“There are two possibilities here,” Stephen said. “One, Sam beat his employer to death with a hammer. Or, two—”

“He saw an actual flying hammer beat his boss to death, and now he’s in a hospital for the criminally insane.”

“That’s the other one.”

“Which one do you think it is?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He rubbed at his hairline. “The forensics fit. The blood splatter on his clothes and body indicated that he had been standing about two feet away from the victim at the time of the attack. The pattern on the hammer was a bit more confusing. His fingerprints were on it, but they seemed to be old prints—the blood was over the top of them. The way the blood ran down the handle, someone’s fingers should have interrupted the stream, but they didn’t. The best guess was that he held the handle very low, and possibly with something like a cloth, but that was never recovered. The oddities about the grip patterns on the weapon could be overlooked because he said he did it.”

“So it could have been a flying hammer?” I said.

“So it could have been a flying hammer. Or it could have been a weird way of holding the hammer. And if you’re bashing people’s brains in with a hammer, you might hold said hammer in a strange way, because it’s a strange activity…Are you sure you’re all right?”

As far as I knew, I was being completely normal. I wasn’t screaming or crying or twitching uncontrollably. And I was feeling increasingly better every second we were out of the hospital. Clearly, though, I was giving off a vibe that indicated I wasn’t okay.

“Just, you know, being in there makes me feel like it might be me, you know? Weird in the head.”

“You’re not weird in the head.”

“There’s a giant talking chicken next to me that would say otherwise.”

“You are not weird in the head,” he said, more firmly. “You went through something horrible, and you survived, and you’ve done amazingly well. You’re strong. Stop making jokes about it. There is nothing wrong with you.”

I wasn’t expecting this little outburst, or the anger that edged his voice.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry. Just don’t do it. It’s important. Because of what we do, it’s important to always remember that there is nothing wrong with you. Don’t make jokes about your own sanity. You didn’t like being in there. Neither did I. It’s scary because when you have the sight, you wonder if you’re going to end up in one of these places.”

“Who knows?” I said. “If I’d told Julia what really happened, maybe I would have. Maybe I would have liked it in there. I think you get to do a lot of crafts. I like crafts. Crafts are good. I can make a mean God’s eye. And I bet you get to eat a lot of pudding. Give me pudding and give me crafts and I’m going to be content for a while…”

“They’re not bad places. I liked my time in one better than school in many ways.”

It’s not a good feeling when you realize you’ve been making jokes about something that the person you’re talking to has actually been through.

“I didn’t mean…”

“I know you didn’t. I’m just telling you. If someone needs mental health care, they belong in a facility like this. But what you have is not a mental illness. I didn’t go into hospital because I saw ghosts; I went because I attempted suicide. And that suicide attempt had nothing to do with the sight.”

I’d never heard someone just come out and talk about their suicide attempt so matter-of-factly. Come to think of it, I’d never heard anyone talk about a suicide attempt at all. Something about the fact that we had just gone into that hospital together had opened a conversational door. I could feel his willingness to talk creeping out like a reluctant cat from under a sofa.

“It was because of your sister’s death,” I said.

“And my inability to deal with it. Or my family’s refusal to do so. Whichever you like. Both apply.”

“How long were you there?” I asked.

“Just over a month.” He pinch-wiped his nose. “My parents sent me to the Priory. No NHS for me. Posh hospital, and as far away as possible. I don’t know if they really thought I needed to go or if they were just trying to get rid of me for a while. I went to hospital. They went to Greece. There was a reason my sister did so many drugs.”

He almost smiled.

“Were you and your sister close?” I asked.

“She was three years older. We both went to boarding schools, different ones. I didn’t even see her that often. I mean, we cared for each other, but we weren’t in each other’s pockets. I had no idea about all the things she’d been doing. I think that was partly why I felt so guilty. She was taking massive amounts of drugs, really dangerous amounts, and I had no idea. None of her so-called friends were all that surprised when she overdosed. I was the only one who was shocked. I was fine for three years, and then…” He cut himself off and brushed some imaginary lint off his sleeve. He was drawing a line under this subject.

“These things,” I said. “They keep happening. Murders.”

“It’s not that there are more things happening. It’s that you’re aware of them now.”

“I think more things are actually happening,” I said.

“It’s still a question of perception. When I did the training to become a police officer, I got to see crime reports. I worked a desk on a Saturday night and saw what came in to the station. I saw people beating each other and stabbing each other. You start to see violence everywhere.”

“I can’t go on like this,” I said. “School’s a joke. I lie to everyone. My friends think I’m pathological.”

“That’s why it’s easier not to say anything at all.”

“How do you not say anything to anyone?”

“When you have no friends, it makes it easier,” he said, with that weird little half smile.

“Not helpful.”

“No…but more to the point, is what Sam told us true?”

Sharing time was over, and we were back to the matter at hand.

“I think I believe him,” I said.

“I’m not sure where I am with it, but it’s worth a trip to the Royal Gunpowder, at least. Callum and Boo should be back from hospital soon. We can go over this evening or tomorrow.”

“Or you can go now,” I said. “With me.”

“Rory.”

“Because if there is something down there, what are you going to do about it?”

“The same thing I’ve been doing for the last few weeks—I’m going to talk to him or her.”

“Yes, but he or she probably killed someone with a hammer, so maybe that’s not a good idea. You need me with you.”

“You need to understand,” he said. “This is our job. I am glad you are back and that you want to help, but—”

“I’ll go by myself, then.”

“You really are difficult, aren’t you?”

“This should not be news.”

“This isn’t a game,” he said.

“When, at any point, has any of this been fun or gamelike to me?” I asked. “Getting stalked for weeks? Getting stabbed? Going into a deserted underground station in the dark to see a man who had murdered about a dozen people? Tell me which part was the game, because I’m missing it.”

I had him there, and he rubbed his nose again.

“Same rules,” he said. “Let me do the talking. And I mean it this time. Promise me, and keep your promise.”

“I promise,” I said. “But, you know, he talked to me—and my talking is the thing that got him to talk.”

“We got away with it in there, but we won’t get away with it in a more public setting. We’ll say you’re a social worker, victim services, just there to observe. Keep your head down and don’t engage. And remember, the owners of this pub just lost a family member.”

“I know.”

“So a certain amount of—”

“I’ll be quiet. You go first. I get it.”

What mattered was that underneath all of this Stephen was saying yes.

The Royal Gunpowder was very crowded. It appeared that some kind of informal memorial gathering was going on. There were flowers on the bar, and the conversation was loud, but respectfully so. We got some looks when we came in—well, Stephen did. I had shed the police accessories and was now playing the part of a person who was not going to say anything. Stephen worked his way to the front in a practiced way. (I’d noticed that most English people knew how to get to the front of a crowded bar, that there was an understood way to shoulder slide to the front without actually cutting anyone else in line.)

There was a woman behind the bar in a plain black dress, deep in conversation with a group of men who were holding their AA chips. She nodded a lot and wiped her eyes a few times. Stephen interrupted as politely as possible and showed his warrant card. I stared into the back of Stephen’s jacket as he introduced himself and made some polite inquiries about how things had gone with the reopening.

“Do you feel comfortable here?” he asked.

“What you mean, comfortable? My father-in-law was beaten to death with a hammer in the basement,” she said. “So, no, I suppose you could say I don’t feel comfortable.”

“I’m very sorry,” Stephen said quickly. “Let me rephrase that. Has anyone been disturbing you? Any vandals? Anything we need to be aware of? Sometimes crime scenes get hangers-on, so we like to check up.”

I peered around Stephen in what I hoped was a casual manner, to see how this was going.

“Oh,” she said. “Course. I see. No, nothing like that.”

“You don’t seem sure. Really. If there’s something, however small, we’ll look into it.”

“Well…” She considered for a moment. “After what happened, we hired a cleaning crew to come in and clear the place up. You can hire people for this sort of thing, you know. They came and scrubbed everything, even the ceiling. Made it perfectly neat and new down there. Then I went down for the first time. I took some of the flowers people had been leaving and put them on the spot where it happened. When I went down the next day to change the water in the vases, they were all in different places. I asked the staff if they done it, and they say they didn’t. They swore they didn’t. But it’s just flowers. You can’t call the police because someone moves your flowers. Anyway, I’m sure one of the staff did it, but maybe they didn’t want to say when I asked. Maybe they thought I’d be angry.”

“It would be helpful if I could go down and have a look,” Stephen said. “Make sure everything’s secure. It will only take a minute.”

“Who’s she?” the woman said, nodding at me.

“Victim relations,” Stephen answered smoothly. “She does the paperwork to make sure everything’s in order.”

I feigned intense interest in a menu on the wall advertising a five-pound lunch special. The woman started to come down with us, but Stephen held up his hand.

“If you can just stay up here,” he said. “It’s procedure. Health and safety. Stupid, I know, but there you go.”

To my surprise, the woman nodded again and went back up the stairs, shutting the door. This astonished me.

“I can’t believe that worked,” I said when we got downstairs. “Procedure? In my town, no one would just let the law into their basement to have a look around for seemingly no reason at all. They’d either get a lawyer or a gun. If uncertain, they’d get both.”

“This is England,” he explained. “Tell someone it’s a procedure, and they’ll believe you. The pointless procedure is one of our great natural resources.”

There was a shelving unit directly at the bottom of the steps, which was full of toilet paper: rolls and rolls of the stuff. Someone liked buying in bulk. There was an open doorway to the right and the left of this.

“Is there anyone down here?” Stephen asked the dark. “We mean you no harm. Please make yourself known to us if you are here.”

No answer.

“Here’s what we are going to do,” Stephen told me. “We go to the bottom of the stairs. You will look to the left, and I will look to the right.”

This was real police stuff—going to the door, one person covering one direction, another covering the opposite. So we did that. I faced a room full of pipes and kegs with no hiding spaces and no ghosts.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Can’t see anything this way,” Stephen said. “But this side goes on a bit and has another room beyond.”

We proceeded cautiously to a narrow room that mostly housed broken-down boxes, then entered a much larger room, which seemed to be the main basement room. This had shelves all around and the barrels that led to the taps upstairs. The lingering scent of some strong chemical hung in the air. But there were no ghosts.

“No reception down here,” Stephen said, looking at his phone before pocketing it. “Not good enough anyway. I can’t access the files with the photos, but I’ve looked at them enough. This is clearly the attack room.”

There was a vase of drooping daffodils on the floor by some beer kegs.

“So let’s go through what we know,” Stephen said. “Both from what Sam said and the report taken at the scene. Sam said he arrived at work at approximately nine forty-five in the morning. Shortly after Sam’s arrival, Charlie Strong left to purchase a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. We have a record of him buying his sandwich; the cash register receipt is marked three minutes after ten. While Charlie was gone, Sam vacuumed the floor. Charlie returns. Sam goes to the basement for the first time to get tonic water. The notes say that when he came up, Charlie was watching Morning with Michael and Alice. They were on the cooking segment of the show—”

“I like that show,” I said. “I watched it a lot at home.”

“—and they were preparing a roast chicken. That segment aired from fourteen minutes after ten until seventeen minutes after ten. Somewhere in the middle of the segment, Charlie instructs Sam to go to the basement to get some nuts and crisps. So here’s what that tells us: at some point shortly after 10:03, Sam goes to the basement for the first time. There is no cross on the floor. The cooking segment was running both when he went down and when he came back up, so we know that the second trip to the basement occurs between 10:14 and 10:17, and at that point, the cross has appeared.”

“You memorized all this?”

“Yes. Anyway, at this point, something happens. The glass is broken, something Sam claims he didn’t do. This suggests agitation on the part of—whatever he claims was down here. Sam yells for Charlie, and Charlie comes down. Charlie finds Sam in distress over this cross and presumably some flying glass. And Sam said Charlie got down on the floor to wipe away the cross.”

Stephen got on his knees in the middle of the floor.

“So Charlie is on his knees. He’s cleaning the floor. What’s a cross? It’s a burial marker. X marks the spot. Maybe whatever it was was marking where it was buried? And the flowers—flowers also mark graves. She just said the flowers down here were also moved, maybe to indicate the site…maybe it attacked because Charlie was interfering with his gravesite?”

While Stephen worked that out, I walked over to the wall that butted against Artillery Lane, where the crack met the outside of the building. There were shelving units all along that wall, full of glasses and boxes of snacks. I tried to look between the shelves to see the wall, but they were too full. I started to remove the items.

“What are you doing?” Stephen asked.

“The crack. I’m trying to see if it comes down this wall.”

Stephen got up and helped me move the boxes and glasses away, and together we moved the metal unit away from the wall. Funny, I was certain what I would find there, and yet I was shocked to actually see it. The crack came from the ceiling, from street level, and extended to about midway down the wall, snaking along the mortar that bound the brick wall of the basement.

“It doesn’t go to the floor,” he said. “So presumably whatever escaped from here, if anything did in fact escape, came from whatever is beyond this wall, under the street.”

“Weird to think of things being buried under the street,” I said.

“There are so many bodies around here. Over sixty-eight thousand of them over by Spitalfields alone. It’s not just a question of there being a body. There’s always a body around in London. I think it’s more of a change of state issue. Maybe there was always some lingering presence here, but the explosion at Wexford woke it? Upset it? Shook it in some way? And it reacted violently to the disruption? Anyone will be upset by a nearby explosion.”

“So you think it was just pissed off?”

“Pissed off ghosts are called poltergeists in the common vernacular, and they do some very bad things.”

I felt a lecture coming on and turned away for a second.

“Stephen,” I said.

“The thing we need to remember—”

“Stephen.” I tugged on his arm to make him turn and look.

The figure was in the doorway. I say “the figure” because I couldn’t quite tell if it was a man or a woman or what age it was. It was a bundle of cloth, of watery features and gray air. I could tell where the eyes were supposed to be, but there were just deep spaces with no center. It rocked back and forth, as if moved by a breeze.

“Hello,” Stephen said.

The figure moved forward a few feet, and not by any method that resembled walking. It just moved and continued quaking at us from a slightly closer location.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” Stephen said. “Can you understand us? Please indicate if you can understand us.”

The figure remained exactly as it was.

“I take that as a no,” Stephen said, mostly to me. “And I think—”

Our new friend took this moment to respond. It made a noise. It didn’t speak or cry, but made a low, aching moan—a moan it refused to stop making.

“I think we can be reasonably sure your hypothesis was correct,” Stephen said, over the noise. “There was something down here.”

“Yep,” I said.

We were frozen against the shelving units, and I got the impression that this thing, whatever it was, had no intention of letting us out. It was unhappy, and presumably the last time it became unhappy it bashed a man’s head in with a hammer.

“I think we should be very careful,” Stephen said.

“You think?”

“I also think that I might be right about this particular entity not liking things moved around. If this is a Bedlam patient, it might suffer from some sort of OCD, or just a desire to have a consistent environment. Order and consistency—”

“It’s upset.”

“It appears upset, yes. But I think it is also listening. Are you listening to us? Can you understand.”

The moan remained consistent.

“Right,” Stephen said. “Well. I suppose it’s trying to communicate in its own way.”

“It communicates with hammers.”

“Yes. It does.”

“Which means I have to take care of it.”

“I told you,” he said, “you don’t have to do anything.”

“We have to get out of this basement. And it killed someone.”

“We don’t know that. But it is very likely.”

“And it might kill someone else. I can’t not do this.”

“But I’m saying—”

I stopped listening. I was in the unusual position of holding all the cards. I had to decide what to do, and only I could do it. And I was going to do it. I had faced frightening things before and had been powerless. But not this time. I extended my arm and stepped toward the figure. It moaned and quaked a bit more, but it didn’t approach or retreat.

For a fleeting moment, I wondered what would happen if it didn’t work—if whatever had been in me had simply gone away, and I was about to paw at a very temperamental creature who did its talking with tools and angry flailing. But as soon as I put my hand out, I knew. First my hand warmed and seemed to stick to the figure. It stopped quaking. I closed my eyes and felt a gentle falling. The thing and I, we were one now and tumbling together through some unknown landscape. And then, with a mild shock sort of like static electricity, the connection was broken, the smell of flowers was in the air, and the thing was gone.

15

EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST STEPS AWAY FROM WEXFORD, Stephen thought it might be a good idea to take me back to the flat to decompress and debrief. I was fine with that. I don’t know how he drove since he was giving me the side-eye the entire time. I guess it was one thing seeing me do my new party trick from a distance or by accident, and it was another thing entirely to see it up close, being used deliberately. I killed a ghost. With my hand.

That was awesome.

“You did the right thing,” he said.

“I know.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Not going to vomit?”

“I’m completely fine,” I said.

“Are you sure? You seem a bit manic.”

“Look,” I said, turning to him, “I’m fine. I was right. You didn’t believe me, but I was right.”

“If I didn’t believe you, would I have gone to the trouble of arranging an interview at the hospital? That wasn’t exactly easy. Are you sure you feel all right?”

“Are you going to stop asking me that?”

“I’ll stop when I think I’ve got the real answer,” he said.

“Oh. Fine then. No. I feel like death.”

“Do you?” he said, almost eagerly.

“No. I feel great.”

I leaned back in the seat and drummed my fingers on the window and tried to look like a cop. I made cop faces at the cars passing by—hard, long stares. Sometimes I’d give them a little nod, as if to say, “You’re doing all right, law-abiding citizen.” I liked being right, and I liked being powerful, and I liked the way I felt right now.

“When we get back to the flat, let me explain to Callum and Boo what’s happened.”

“You always want to do all the talking,” I replied.

“Because it is my job. I am in charge. And I was trying not to get us both caught out today. It’s a crime to impersonate a police officer.”

“I mean in general. Even Callum says…”

Stephen jerked his head in my direction, and I knew I had overstepped. This is what happens when I feel too good. I talk and talk and talk and eventually I start saying things that are supposed to be in the secret file, the things other people told you that you were supposed to keep to yourself and then…boop! Out they come.

“Callum says what?”

“That you’re…serious,” I said. “About your job.”

“Of course I’m serious about my job.”

“That’s what he says,” I replied.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning…you can tell them. And something I never understood…how does it work, you being a police officer, but not a police officer, or—”

There was every chance that Stephen knew I was trying to switch topics. He definitely wanted to know what Callum had said. But I understood Stephen enough now to know that he could always be relied on to talk about procedures and how things worked. He would be compelled to answer me.

“Technically,” he said, “I am a sworn police officer. I’m just not assigned to any particular station or role, at least not as far as the Met is concerned. I went through the training. I did five weeks at Hendon, another four months or so at Bethnal Green, then in-person training out of Charing Cross police station, then back to Hendon. It took about eight months. On the side, I was given some bespoke training at the MI5 training academy, most of it on how to get into places where security clearance is needed. Oh, and management. They had me do some management training. All in all, it took about a year, but I’m still learning, every day. A lot of these jobs, they train you, but you really learn by doing it. Normal constables train with experienced people, but no one does my job. I have Thorpe, I suppose.”

“He’s scary,” I said.

“He has to be like that. You can’t let your emotions get in the way of what you need to do, and you can’t have too much of a personality, at least on show. But he’s all right. Every time I’ve needed something from him, he’s been there. And, frankly, I don’t think he knows what to make of us. Must have been a shock to get us as an assignment. He might be relieved if it all falls apart. He can go back to finding terrorists or whatever he did before.”

“I guess that is kind of crazy,” I said. “He doesn’t have the sight. He just has to take your word for it that there are ghosts and that you’re getting rid of them?”

“Basically. Now, what did Callum say?”

“Nothing,” I said. He didn’t press the matter.

The flat had the sour smell of day-old garbage. Some effort had been made to pick up the place. Dirty containers had been bagged up and left to ripen in the kitchen. In addition to that scent was a sharp, familiar fragrance that made me wildly hungry.

“Look who it is!” Callum said. He was on the sofa, eating something from a bowl. Presumably this was the source of the good smell. God, I was starving. Taking out the ghosts clearly took something out of me. Boo was walking around the room in a pair of yoga shorts, flexing and pivoting on her newly freed leg. She spun around when Callum spoke.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to see me, right? I have my leg back!”

“How does it feel?”

“Ready to kick something,” she said. “Still itches. And I think it might’ve shrunk? That can happen, you know. The muscles lose tone.”

“Looks the same size to me.”

“Does it?”

She bent over and examined her leg for a moment. I would have been freezing in those shorts. The flat was hardly warm. But English people are hearty.

“What is that?” I asked Callum. “It smells amazing.”

“Jerk goat,” he said. “Made by my mum last night.”

“Can I try it?”

“This is the real thing. My mum’s from Kingston. This is a family recipe.”

“I can’t eat that,” Boo said. “And I can eat almost anything.”

“I can eat anything,” I said.

“Not joking,” Callum said. “This stuff would actually kill you.”

“I’m hard to kill.”

“If you like.” He held the bowl out to me. “But I’m warning you. Be careful.”

The meat in the bowl was gray and cooked to soft pieces. I held the bowl up to my nose and inhaled the delicious, prickly aroma of things that were on the high end of the Scoville scale. My eyes watered very gently from the pepper oils. Spicy food and I have a close relationship—an obsessive one, in fact. If it’s spicy, I want it. I want to sweat and shake and go half blind from the searing pain…which, now that I put it that way, seems really suggestive. But spicy stuff is addictive. That’s a known fact of science. I shoveled in three forkfuls one right after the other. And then, after riding through the sweats and shakes, had another. Callum burst out laughing.

“Clearly you are fine,” Stephen said.

“Why wouldn’t she be?” Boo asked.

Boo had been eyeing Stephen for about a minute now. I noticed it through the waves of delicious pain. Considering how large and luminous and heavily lined her eyes were, it was remarkable how she had mastered the subtle stare. I’d only learned to see it because she had applied it to me for about a week straight when we first met.

“We need to talk to you about where we’ve been this morning,” Stephen said.

And so, he told them. His account was all right. I would have added a lot more description and detail.

“One morning,” Callum finally said. “We were gone for one morning and this happens?”

“It wasn’t planned that way. We went to the hospital, and then we stopped into the pub on the way back to Wexford. It all happened quite quickly, and Rory handled it very well.”

“Boom boom,” I said to Callum, hoping that would bring some light to the room, but he didn’t react. Boo flexed her long purple nails.

“So this will look good to Thorpe,” Callum said. “At least we have that. They’ll reward us with great riches. Or, maybe, a new sofa from IKEA.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Stephen said.

“Why not?” Boo asked.

“Well, this might cause him more problems. The case against Sam Worth is fairly damning, between the forensics and the confession. It’s going to be difficult for them to make this one go away, especially with a grieving family. They can’t say that there was a ghost going around beating people’s brains in with a hammer, so Sam Worth has to be set free. Someone has to be seen to pay, just like in the Ripper case.”

“So Sam goes down for it?” Boo said. “It’s not right.”

“We can only do our job. We leave it to other agencies to do the rest.”

“But that’s not right,” Boo said. “He didn’t do it.”

“But he confessed,” Stephen said. “And the forensics back up his confession. Even he would rather think he did it than admit to himself that some terrible unseen thing was in the room.”

“So he just stays in prison?” Boo said.

“Again, that’s beyond our scope. But there’s something else that isn’t. On the night of the attack, the floor of the bathroom cracked open. Rory also found a crack—”

“I know about this,” Callum said.

“And he told me,” Boo added. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all got together to tell each other things?”

“Right,” Stephen said, sidestepping this. “Well, the crack is also present in the basement wall of the Royal Gunpowder. It’s now a safe working assumption that the crack is in some way connected to both the woman Rory saw in the bathroom and the murder in the pub. So we should find out exactly how far this crack extends. To that end…all around London, there are GPS stations, used to track location. Mobile phone towers are also GPS stations. Aside from being location trackers, they can monitor the movement of the earth to a very high and precise degree. They’re used to monitor earthquake damage now. We could potentially use that information to determine the size and location of the crack. Once we know that, we can deal with the question of precisely what it’s done.”

“Can we access that information?” Callum asked.

“We can ask Thorpe about it,” Stephen replied. “I can get that process started. In the meantime, you and Boo should cover the area, working in hundred-yard circles. Canvas everything. Check streets, go into shops, access as many basement levels as you can. I’ll see if we can’t get you both some British Gas uniforms right away.”

“I can also check with the Tube engineers to see if there are any broken substructures in the Liverpool Street area,” Callum said.

“Good.”

“I can get into Wexford,” Boo added. “Come for a visit, have a look around.”

“What about me?” I asked.

All three of them looked over. While I realized I was not a member of the squad, I certainly felt like I was entitled to be a part of whatever happened next. I think Callum was about to say something along those lines, because he nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but Stephen reached over and smoothly picked up the car keys.

“You should probably get back,” he said. “You’ve been gone most of the day.”

Boo and Callum exchanged a look. Stephen was already moving toward the door. I took the hint and pulled myself off of the broken-down sofa.

“What did Callum say to you?” Stephen said when we were back in the car. “And don’t say nothing.”

“He just…he kind of feels you try to do it all yourself.”

“I don’t.” Stephen shifted his jaw. “I’m in charge. There’s a difference. We work in a secret department. I can’t just tell everyone everything.”

“Not everyone. Callum and Boo. There’s only three of you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does,” I said. “If you don’t talk to them, who else are you going to talk to? They’re the only other people who know what’s going on.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped. “You don’t understand my job.”

Well, that got a reaction. Interesting. I didn’t mind the snapping, and I gave him time to work out his feelings on the car. He ground through a few gears and maneuvered around a bus a little faster than normal, gunning the engine a bit. I don’t know how to drive a manual car, so all the gear changes fascinated me. He didn’t hold the gearshift, either—he kept his fingers flat and straight and pushed on it with his palm. It was a relaxed stance, not a tense death grip.

“You like driving,” I said.

“It’s good for thinking,” he said in a low voice.

“I like to sing and drive,” I said. “I only sing in the car, but I tell you, I am good. But only when I drive. I suck otherwise. Do you ever sing in the car?”

“Generally not. But I am driving a police car.”

“I think people would like a singing policeman. Makes life seem more like a musical. Everyone wants to live in a musical. Like Foot-tastic.”

“You can talk for a long time about nothing.”

“I certainly can, you charming man!”

His arms and shoulders sagged a bit, and the car slowed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like keeping Callum and Boo in the dark about some things, but I barely know how to do my own job. It can be terrifying to tell them to do something when I don’t even have the facts. This job is dangerous. Boo’s been hurt. You’ve been hurt. I’ve been hurt. Callum was hurt before he was on the job. And if one of us was killed, would they even care? Or would they just tidy it away, like they did with the old squad? Bury our files and make it all disappear?”

“So why do it?” I asked.

Stephen exhaled slowly.

“Better than banking, I suppose.”

“Did you just make a joke?”

“I am capable of that.”

“You are?”

“I’m full of surprises,” he said.

He pulled up by Spitalfields.

“I’ll leave you by here,” he said. “It’s best not to keep to the same places all the time. You can get back from here all right?”

“I think I can walk two streets over.”

“Of course. And, just so you know…the timing alone suggests that the situation is safe. The crack opened over three weeks ago. You found one person within a day, and another turned up within forty-eight hours. If more had come up, I’d like to think we would have seen some evidence by now. This could be the end of the matter. But we’ll do all we can and I’ll keep you informed. I just don’t want you to worry.”

“I’m not worried,” I said, opening my door and getting out.

He leaned over to have a better look at me.

“You’re not,” he said, “are you?”

And I wasn’t. I realized on some level that I definitely should be worried if there was, in fact, a raging tear of angry ghosts under my building. Perhaps being a terminus did something to the chemicals in my brain. Or maybe I was just nuts, burned out from all that had happened to me.

“Promise me,” he said, “if you see something, anything, you’ll phone us first. Don’t try to deal with it alone.”

“Like I’d do that,” I said, smiling.

“I think you might. I mean it. Don’t try to do it alone.”

“That’s been the message of today’s session,” I replied. “I’m glad you got it. I think we’ve accomplished a lot.”

“Go.”

But he smiled. He didn’t want me to see, but I totally saw.

16

JAZZA WAS KNITTING A LARGE BLUE TUBE.

It seemed to fit in with the way my day was going. Spend the morning at a mental hospital. Blast a murderous ghost into oblivion. Come home, and the roommate is knitting some long tube. Why not?

“You’re knitting a big tube,” I said. “You knit?”

“When I’m nervous,” she said.

The tube looked to be about four feet long and was pretty narrow. Jazza’s German books were scattered all over her bed, partially obscured by wool. It looked like she was trying to read and knit at the same time.

“Is it…for a snake or something?”

“I just learned how to do sleeves for sweaters, and I can’t stop making them. I’m going to fail German.”

“You’re going to be fine,” I said automatically.

“I’m not,” she said calmly. “Which is why I’m knitting. It’s very meditative. Where have you been? You weren’t answering your phone.”

“Oh…” I quickly turned toward my closet and opened the door. “I was at the National Gallery. Doing research for an art history project.”

I’d come up with that excuse when I was about three feet away from the door.

“Oh. Right. Is…that my skirt?”

“Oh. Yeah. I borrowed it. Is that okay?”

“Course,” she said. “I was just wondering.”

Jazza allowed me to borrow her clothes, although I usually asked before I did so. But being Jazza and a nice person, she didn’t grill me on why I needed to wear her black skirt to go to the museum to do research. I slipped off the skirt and hung it up in her closet. Then I went into my own closet and needlessly busied myself going through my clothes, dragging the hangers across the rail with a terrible squeak that ate away at the edges of my nerves. I smelled of mental hospital. The tang of it was in my shirt. I pulled it off and threw it into my laundry bag.

Behind me, I heard the clickclackclickclack of Jazza’s needles gently striking together. The light clinking of the radiators kicking into life. Everything was clicking and clanking. What was I doing all day? Oh, I just solved a murder, is all. Solved a murder, took out the murderer. What was the point of that, though, if you couldn’t tell your roommate ?

“Revision party tonight,” she said.

I’d forgotten all about this. The revision party was just a long study session in the refractory. The school kept it open late and served snacks.

“I may not stay,” she said. “I have to speak out loud to get ready for the German oral. Do you think you’ll stay over there?”

“I…maybe?”

“Are you all right?” Jazza said. “You seem a bit…”

I guess she didn’t know what I seemed like, which was fair. Neither did I.

“Headache,” I said. “I’m going to shower. Warm up. My blood is too thin for this weather.”

I scoured the hospital stink from my skin with copious squirts of body wash that slicked the shower stall tiles and caused me to slip twice and bang both my elbow and head into the wall. I cranked the water up to the maximum temperature, reveling in the great clouds of steam I created. The ghost destroyer in her robes of mist. Alone at last, warm at last. I closed my eyes and let the water pour over me, and I thought about everything that had happened in the basement. It had been so simple—I’d just reached out and destroyed. It was no more complicated than stepping on a bug.

I allowed myself the fantasy of confronting Newman again, but as I was now. I saw him coming at me with the knife, and I just reached out and touched him with the tips of my fingers—

Then someone opened the bathroom door and I jumped.

“Who’s in there?” a voice called. Eloise’s, I thought.

“Rory!”

“It’s so steamy in here. I can’t even see where I’m going!”

“Sorry!”

I wrapped myself in my towel and pushed back the curtain. I really had done a job on the bathroom. All the mirrors were completely fogged, and the floor had a shiny veneer of moisture.

I did a quick little run back to my room and got changed for dinner. Jazza had stopped muttering German and was now just knitting, waiting for me to get ready. We walked over with Gaenor and Angela, both of whom had gone deep into exam madness mode. They laughed at everything. They cackled. They may have been drunk. I wasn’t sure.

We sat with Andrew and some other guys from Aldshot. When I asked where Jerome was, I got some not very specific replies about him being held up doing something. He finally came in during the last ten minutes of service, grabbed a plate, and sat down heavily. He made short work of a few pieces of pizza, and he didn’t have much to say.

Mount Everest, our esteemed, massive, and always angry headmaster, took to the raised podium that used to be the altar back when the refectory was a chapel.

“Everyone,” he began, “the dinner service will now be cleared for tonight’s revision party. Please assist by clearing your trays and putting them on the racks. The refectory will be open until midnight. Make sure to check in with your assigned prefect and let him or her know when you return to your building. While you may talk during tonight’s session, please remember to think of your neighbors and control your volume.”

“I’m going back.” Jazza stood up. “See you at home.”

Angela left as well, leaving Gaenor, Andrew, Jerome, and me in a group. A few people came over to ask the guys questions or tell them where they were going to be, and Charlotte came to check on me to see if I was staying. I pulled my books out from under the bench and tried to pick the subject I might have a chance of making some progress on. I decided on further maths. I could do some problems. Math problems gave me a feeling of accomplishment.

I was quickly distracted when the kitchen staff started putting out the study snacks—bowls of potato chips, trays of cookies, pitchers of pale lemon and orange drink. I immediately got up to help myself, but then the guy in front of me sneezed into his hand and dug the same hand into the chip bowl. I returned to my seat and tried to do more problems. I was also trying to make eye contact with Jerome, who was working on Spanish. I tapped my leg against his under the table, then I rubbed my calf against his. He lifted his head partway, but kept looking down at the table.

I pushed my notebook toward him and wrote, What’s wrong?

He scratched his nose, then wrote, Nothing. Just trying to work.

Which was fair. Everyone was working. I seemed to be the only one with her head on a swivel, unable to concentrate. I stayed for two hours, managing to get through about twenty problems. I poked through some pages of French as well.

“I may go back too,” I said quietly.

“I can take you back,” Jerome said. “I’ll let you in.”

I assumed this was Jerome saying he was ready for a study break in the form of face-sucking. I slapped my books closed and scooped them up.

When we stepped outside, I expected his arm to slip around my waist. That didn’t happen. He did head toward the darkness of the green, though, to a bench. It was under the shadow of a tree, which blocked the streetlight. I sat down next to him. The cold of the bench immediately attached itself to my butt and crawled its little fingers up my back. I leaned into Jerome for warmth. This is where he should have turned and put his face next to mine. Instead, he just sat there, slightly slumped forward over his knees. I reached over and pushed aside one of his longer half curls that was just brushing his ear. I would start there. Jerome liked those little kisses around the ear.

He shifted away ever so slightly.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I just wanted some air.”

There was no shortage of that—night offered all of the cold, wet air you could ever want.

“Okay,” I said. “Air. We’ve got it.”

“You missed art today,” he said. There was no particular inflection behind it, just a statement of fact.

“I did,” I said. “I was—”

I was about to say “not feeling well” when he cut me off.

“You were researching at the National Gallery?”

I hadn’t told him this particular little fib. I’d told Jazza. When had they had time to exchange that information? And why had they exchanged it? And why hadn’t I come up with something better to tell Jazza? Because I’d been busy, that’s why. Okay, better question—when was I going to shut up and explain this?

“I…yes. I was doing my project? That Mark is having me do? Because I’m behind?”

“You missed art history to work on art history?”

“Well, it sounds stupid when you put it like that—”

“What’s the project on?”

“What?”

“What were you doing research on?”

This took me completely by surprise. I couldn’t think of any paintings. Any. In the entire world.

He knew. I had never gone to the museum. In the chill and the dark, with the damp creeping into my clothes, the world was suddenly very foreign and unfriendly. And when I didn’t answer, he stood up and paced in front of the bench.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said.

“Do what?”

He inhaled loudly through his nose and ground one of his heels slowly into the grass.

“On Wednesday night,” he said, “where did you go?”

“What?”

“Wednesday?”

Wednesday…what had I been doing on Wednesday?

“You were with some guy,” he prompted me.

Of course. On Wednesday I had gone out with Callum. Callum, he of the many muscles, who almost played professional soccer. The fact that Jerome knew who I was with made me…well, actually kind of furious.

“Did you follow me or something?”

“No, I didn’t follow you. A few of the year elevens saw you.”

I handled that badly. I raised my hands in apology.

“Sorry,” I said. “I mean…he’s a friend of mine. Just a friend. You’re being paranoid.”

That was probably the wrong thing to say. In fact, I was 100 percent certain that was the wrong thing to say, but I said it anyway.

“Paranoid?” he said. “You’re lying to me.”

Well, he was right about that. But all the things he was thinking, those were wrong. Which meant that I had to do some very fast talking. Where, where, where could I have been?

“I was at therapy!”

And I said it loudly. Really loudly. I startled him, I startled myself, and I startled some little creature crawling around near the trash next to the bench, because I heard it scurry off.

“Therapy?” he said.

“Therapy,” I repeated.

“And that guy…”

“Is in my therapy group.”

“So you’ve been going to therapy and you decided to…”

“Lie?” I said. “I said that to Jazza because she asked where I was and the museum was the first thing I could think of. I never said anything to you because I didn’t want you to have the girlfriend who always talked about her therapy. I mean, I’m already American. That would make me super American. Don’t you think we’re all in therapy or something?”

I don’t like admitting this about myself, but I lie well. I come from a long line of people who can tell a story, who can elaborate on reality. I can sound convincing. And my words were having the right effect. Jerome was finally looking at me.

“There’s nothing wrong with therapy,” he said.

“I never said there was. I just don’t want to talk about it all the time. I don’t always want to be the girl who got stabbed, okay?”

All that, perfectly true. In fact, so true that my eyes were watering a bit and my voice cracked a little.

“You can talk to me,” he said. “You can tell me what’s going on. That’s kind of the point.”

I hated this. I hated lies, and I hated pity. I think I hated pity more. I hated looking damaged and weird and Jerome wanting to talk about feelings. I was so sick of feelings.

“I want to help,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry—”

“Forget it,” I said. “The point is, there’s nothing going on. There’s nothing to tell you.”

Oh, except that I took down a murderous ghost today. And went to a mental institution to interview a murderer. Except for that.

“I can’t believe I did this,” he said.

Now his voice was honeyed with guilt, and my stomach was churning slowly, like a soft-serve ice cream machine.

That was what did it. The guilt. This emotional mess that I didn’t want and I didn’t need. I liked making out with Jerome and I liked that Jerome existed in the boyfriend sense, but I didn’t want to deal with all of his feelings about my feelings.

“We shouldn’t do this,” I heard myself say.

“Do what? Fight?”

“This,” I said again, and flopped my hands around in a way that was supposed to mean us. This thing that we were.

Amazingly, Jerome spoke hand-flop. I saw it hit him, and I saw him try to deflect it by quickly looking away, as if it didn’t hurt.

“Break up,” he said. “That’s what you want.”

This wasn’t his fault. I had lied to him—not because I was evil, but because I had to. My life was a disaster and I was sick of problems and he was just one more. Breaking up made things simple. For me, anyway.

I felt queasy now, and I just wanted it all to stop. I wanted to go inside.

“I’m going in,” I said.

He didn’t reply. It seemed so harsh, what I was doing. I hadn’t planned it, and I seemed to be moving on autopilot, walking away, leaving him there on the bench.

Then there was Jazza. Jazza, I was certain, had asked me where I was for a reason. She had reported it to Jerome. My suspicion was confirmed when I stepped into the room and she immediately pulled off her headphones. German mumblings leaked into the air. She set the knitting aside like she might have to make a sudden leap out of the window.

“You’re back early,” she said, her voice wavering a bit.

I sat on the edge of my bed and faced her. Jazza was too compulsively honest to keep up any façade.

“Did you talk to Jerome?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Are things okay?”

“I wasn’t cheating.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“But he did.”

I could see her choosing her words carefully—plucking each one delicately out of the lexicon in her head, as if she were picking up tubes full of explosive chemicals.

“I don’t know what he thought,” she said. “But he was concerned. And confused. And…I think you’ve been coping with this, and no one knows what that’s been like for you and we all respect that and…it’s…it’s hard to know? What you’re thinking? But I told him to just talk to you and…”

“We broke up.”

A widening of the eyes.

“Oh…but…no! But…nothing was…”

“I just can’t do this right now.”

“Oh.”

A more final oh. An oh that sounded understanding. She got off her bed and came and sat next to me on mine.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“That’s all anyone has asked me for weeks.”

“Oh, I’m sorry…I…”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I really am. I might even be too fine. I should be upset, but I’m not. I’m just…nothing. I just did it. I had to.”

All of that was true. I didn’t really know why I had done it—why I had just broken up with the only actual boyfriend I’d ever had. But I just knew I had to.

The radiator clanged and whistled, and Jazza and I sat there, both staring down at the floor. She was my friend, but she was Jerome’s friend before she knew me.

“Do you hate me?” I asked.

“Do you know what I think?” she replied.

“Smarter and better things than me?”

“I think…we should go next door and see if Gaenor and Angela have any plonk.”

“Plonk?”

“Wine. And I have chocolate. I say we wrap ourselves in our duvets and drink wine and eat chocolate.”

I started to shake my head—I didn’t want anyone to be nice to me—but Jazza was not taking any of that. She pulled me upright, yanked the cover from my bed, and wrapped it around my shoulders.

“This is not me asking,” she said. “This is me telling you.”

17

THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF CHURCH bells. London is full of them, old bells in old stone towers, calling out through the gray December gloom. They continued to ring and vibrate in my head, each percussive blow bringing thoughts of nausea. I’d had one and a half mugs of the warm and cheap red wine Gaenor kept in the bottom of her closet, really not that much, but the effect was still seeping over me. My mouth felt like an acre of cotton field, and there was a vague and unspecified ache crawling up and down from my stomach to my head.

I liked it. I liked waking up like this. I’d had a good night. Everyone had rallied around me—Gaenor and Angela and Jazza. Eloise had come in and told us about all the French guys she’d dumped. No one seemed to think I was a monster—though I was sure Jazza was going to check on Jerome immediately and make sure he was okay. She was already awake, bundled in her robe, a cup of tea in her hand and the German book back in front of her face.

“Morning,” she said. “Breakfast? I’ve been up for hours now and I’m starving.”

Hours? A look at my watch (and the bong of the bells) told me it was only nine in the morning. She was making up for the time she’d lost on me last night.

Breakfast, of course, meant facing my now ex-boyfriend. It was going to be an issue, this eating business. I sat with Jerome and Jazza and Andrew. How would I ever eat again?

“Not for me,” I said. “I think I’ll stay here and die.”

“Ill?”

“A little. I’ll be fine. You go.”

So Jazza got herself together and left, and I thought about the word ex-boyfriend.

How was this going to be, seeing him everywhere? What the hell had I done? A quick flush of terrible feelings came over me—guilt, sadness, shame—they were all in there. I shook them off. This morning I would find some money—I had to have a few pounds left—and get a muffin and a coffee for myself. I would deal.

I shabbily dressed myself in already worn sweatpants and a T-shirt, brushed my hair with my fingers, and rubbed some terrible crud from my eyes, then I scuffed down the steps. As I reached the bottom, Charlotte came out of Claudia’s office.

“Oh,” she said. “Here she is now. Rory? Claudia needs to see you.”

“What for?” I mouthed.

Charlotte smiled a bit stiffly and gave a little shrug. I stepped around her and into the office.

“Please close the door,” Claudia said. “I’ll be just a moment.”

She was typing away on her computer and didn’t look up. Her office was icy cold and kind of dark. She had all the lights off except her desk lamp, and only a small electric heater by her desk. I huddled in the chair, pulling my fleece down over my hands.

“Aurora.” She swung around to face me, and the effect was a bit disturbing, like I had been called into the office of the evil supervillain. “Tell me about how this week has gone for you.”

“Oh. Well, it’s been good, I think.”

I was expecting that she would say something rote in return. “Good” or “glad to hear it” or “let’s arm wrestle in celebration, for I am very strong.” But she didn’t. The high, red flush on her cheeks seemed a bit higher and redder than normal, and the cold crept up my sleeves and down my neck.

“Aurora,” she said again. (It’s never good when someone uses your name twice at the start of a conversation.) “I am aware…”

She let her open-ended awareness hang in the air for a moment.

“I am aware…you were a bit behind when you returned.”

“Well,” I said, “I did what I could. You know. I was…”

“Of course.”

She adjusted something in the top drawer of her desk that must have prevented it from closing all the way and gave it a firm push.

“You have handled this situation very bravely. But there are some concerns. It’s become fairly evident that you are falling behind academically, possibly to the point where you cannot catch up to the place you need to be.”

She opened a folder on her desk, and I saw it contained my history pre-exam.

“I wasn’t really ready for that one,” I said.

“These are quite basic questions, and much of this was material you covered before your departure…though of course I understand that there were stressors then as well. But there are other things. I have reports of you using your phone in class, of sleeping in class, and even, just yesterday, of missing class.”

Okay, so maybe they did track you at Wexford.

“And I do understand that these circumstances you are in are not normal,” Claudia went on. “But you should know that anyone else would have already been disciplined for this. Anyone else at your level of progress would already be gone.”

“The class I missed,” I said. “I was at therapy. That’s where I was.”

“You had therapy? You haven’t been to the sanatorium.”

“With an outside person. Charlotte gave me her name.”

That was possibly a misstep. If Claudia called Charlotte, Charlotte would give her Jane’s name and number, and if Claudia called Jane, she would soon discover that I was a big fat liar. The lies, the problems, they seriously never ended.

“If you are going for treatment, we need to be informed—certainly if that means you won’t be in class.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it was okay for me to go.”

Claudia pursed her lips and looked down at the desk drawer again. The room suddenly seemed very dark, and the orangey light from her desk lamp throbbed in my vision.

“Having you come back was an experiment,” she said. “We’ve had a week to assess where you are. And I have to be honest, Aurora…I don’t think it’s quite fair to you to have you continue at Wexford. Perhaps this isn’t the best place for you to regain your footing. Before you go through the stress and strain of exams, I want you to think carefully. I think you should consider departing early.”

What was happening? This couldn’t be what I thought it was. Because it sounded like I was being kicked out.

“Departing early?” I said.

“The exam process is quite arduous, and it was always a worry. There is no shame in any of this. You are not to blame for the events that led up to this moment. However, I don’t see how you can recover academically, certainly not enough to participate in the exams. If you wish, you may remain for the exams. I am trying…”

And she was clearly trying. I didn’t think this was comfortable for her at all. For all her meatiness and love of hockey violence, I never got the feeling that Claudia was an unkind person.

“I’m trying to give you the best way out. Go home for the holidays. Be with your family. Make a fresh start in the new year.”

“But not here,” I said.

“I think it’s unlikely, Aurora.”

I would not cry in Claudia’s office. No. I would not. I looked up, because sometimes you can dry up your eyes that way, but all I saw were mounted hockey sticks. Hockey sticks are not calming.

“Have you talked to my parents?” I managed to ask.

“Not yet, no. And to be clear, this is not a punishment. This is just something very unfortunate, and I truly want what’s best for you. If you really feel you can handle the exams, then by all means, stay on and take them. But if you don’t…and there’s no shame…”

Funny there being no shame, because all I felt at the moment was shame. Shame is like melting. You can actually feel your muscles sag and drop, as if your body is preparing you to crawl, or possibly ooze, to the nearest exit.

“Think it over and let me know what you would like to do,” she said. “I don’t want to make this harder on you than it already is. How about we speak again tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Sure.”

I pushed back my chair, and it scraped loudly on the floor and wrinkled the oriental rug. In the lobby, I paused by the pigeonholes and listened to some screaming laughter from the common room. Someone dropped something in one of the rooms overhead, and it made a loud thunk on the ceiling. Hawthorne was full of life.

I climbed the stairs slowly, past the dozen or so framed and all slightly crooked photographs that lined the entire stairway. Sports day photos and team photos and class photos. I would not be a part of this place. My image wouldn’t hang on the wall. Once the talk of the school, I’d quickly be forgotten, like Alistair, who died in his bed. The Ripper news wasn’t even the biggest story in London anymore. That was over. A political scandal had taken its place.

I stopped in between the fire doors on the second floor and stared at my hall through the glass window. Today was Sunday. We had “reading days” through Monday, which just meant study days. Then the exams were Tuesday and Wednesday. I wasn’t going to get anything accomplished today, and tomorrow wasn’t looking so great either. Exams on Tuesday, and then Tuesday night to scrape up whatever remnants of my brain were left and try to mold them back into a brainlike shape for the next two exams.

I stood there in the two feet of vestibule, the one that always stank so sharply of industrial carpeting. I probably would have stayed there all day, except that there were loud footsteps and Charlotte threw open the door behind me.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

That was all it took. I just started crying. Proper, full-on crying. I flowed like some kind of industrial hose. Charlotte instantly put an arm around me and walked me down to her room, pushing my face into her shoulder and her masses of red hair.

Charlotte had a single, much smaller than my room. But the smallness also made it feel more snug, and probably a lot warmer. Unlike me, she didn’t store her partially worn clothes on the back of a desk chair. I had seen her room from the hallway many times, but never from the inside. On the wall where the door was, the entire thing, floor to ceiling, was a collage. We were allowed to Blu-Tack things to our walls. She had a carefully curated selection of tear-outs from fashion magazines of models reading books, posing with books, or generally standing near or approaching books. Glamour and brains, all glossy, all perfectly arranged on the wall. It must have taken her a long time to put them up, to make sure they lined up just right, neat and square to the edges of the wall.

It took me by such surprise that I stopped crying. I’m not sure why it came as such a shock to see that Charlotte had decorated her wall in this way.

“I’m failing,” I said, wiping my nose with the sleeve of my fleece. There was a large floppy cushion on her floor, all ready to receive my butt, so I took advantage of it. “I missed too much. I’m too behind. Claudia said I could stay and take the exams, but there’s kind of no point…”

To her credit, Charlotte didn’t argue this. Nor did she try the Jazza way, telling me things would be fine when they clearly would not be fine.

“Have you discussed some other arrangement?” she asked. “Maybe you can take the exams at another time?”

“No.” I shook my head. “They’re sure I’m not going to catch up, not this year. And she’s right. I’m not going to catch up.”

“So you’re going back to Bristol.”

“I guess?”

“And go to school there?”

That’s what my parents said before I returned to Wexford in this little experiment. That was before the experiment totally failed, and my parents were about to be told that this whole year was basically a bust. God only knew what would happen now.

I leaned back against the radiator and banged my head against it gently. It was much too hot to be leaning against, but better burning hot than cold. I didn’t really care if it seared my back. I looked from picture to picture on her wall, my eyes twitching a bit as they took in the information. Books and brains. Successful girls.

I was not a successful girl.

“Jane,” she said, handing me a box of tissues. “I think you should go talk to Jane. Today. Right now.”

“There’s nothing she can do,” I said. “This is all academic stuff—”

“No,” Charlotte said firmly. “She can help. And I know she’d see you.”

There was a look to Charlotte—a bit of an evangelical glow. Jane was the magic problem solver as far as she was concerned. It must have been nice to have that kind of faith in therapy, or problems that could actually be solved.

“Jane’s dealt with all kinds of people in crisis. Loads of people who have been expelled. I know she could help. Let me phone her. Please.”

Charlotte made the call. I could tell from her end of the conversation that Jane was fine with me coming over.

This was one of those moments when I was excruciatingly aware that I was not at home. At home, I had friends at the other end of a phone, friends who were close by. I had friends here, but they were friends I’d been lying to almost as long as I’d known them. I’d had a boyfriend up until last night. He’d probably be glad this had happened…

No. He wouldn’t. That was worse.

I had Stephen. I could call Stephen.

Except my being kicked out destroyed everything. All his work. The squad. Me gone from Wexford meant no terminus, no squad, nothing. How had so much come to rest on me? Me, the one who, given the opportunity, would wake up at three P.M. every afternoon and eat Cheez Whiz twice a day. I was not the kind of person on which the fate of police organizations should rest.

I just wanted to go back to bed and wake up when I was twenty-five.

“She says to come right over,” Charlotte confirmed as she hung up. “I told her the basics. And don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. Not a word.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’ll figure this out,” Charlotte said. “It’s going to be fine, no matter what happens.”

Of course, Charlotte had a very limited knowledge of things that could happen.

18

JANE’S VIVID RED HAIR WAS ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST THINGS on the street. She was wearing an extraordinary dress—one with long flat shoulder pieces that raised up at the tips. The dress was both boxy, baggy, and form fitting and was made of an African-inspired print in orange and black and yellow.

“Cup of tea,” she said, ushering me inside. “And a little something sweet.”

“It’s okay. I don’t want anything.”

“I have to insist. I don’t problem solve on an empty stomach. Let’s perk up your blood sugar a bit. You’ve had a shock. You look peaky.”

It was very dim in the hallway. I caught just the tiniest glint of the strange silvery leopard over in the corner and the fans of gold on the wallpaper. She drew me deeper into the house, past the staircase, to the kitchen. The kitchen had a bit more light pouring in from the garden windows—not that there was much light to be had.

“Very interesting ones today,” she said, pushing forward a container of baked goods. “This is an Earl Grey shortbread, and this brownie is made with orange and chili. Eat it. You’ll feel better.”

Jane’s practical and positive manner was infectious. I did as I was told. I plucked out a brownie and ate it in three bites, crumbs falling from my mouth onto the counter. She nodded in satisfaction and went about filling the kettle and setting it to boil.

“Now,” she said, “Charlotte told me the basics. What were you told, exactly?”

I recounted the conversation with Claudia, and Jane listened soberly.

“You could take the exams,” she said.

“I could. But I have more or less no chance of passing.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

The kettle clicked off, and she filled the teapot and set out the mugs and milk and sugar.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “And I want you to really think about this question. Tell me truly. Why did you come back? ”

“They sent me back,” I said.

“Who did?”

“My…doctor.”

Jane cocked her head at this answer.

“But you could have said no. Surely, you could have returned to America. But you came back here.”

“I had to,” I said.

“Had to?”

“It’s complicated.” The understatement of the year. “My shrink…sorry…thought it was a good idea. It was an experiment in making me normal again. And it failed.”

“Now, now,” Jane said sternly. “None of that. None of that. You’ve failed nothing.”

“Besides school.”

“You can hardly call what you’ve accomplished a failure, Rory. Think about it. How many people could come to a foreign country to do a year of school to begin with? And then continue with school after a brutal attack?”

“I kind of don’t care,” I said. “I’m tired of being different because something happened to me. I just want things to be regular. And nothing is ever regular now.”

A cloud passed over whatever sun there was, and the kitchen dropped into shadow. She got up and turned on the overhead light, then filled our cups with tea. She put sugar in hers, and I was mesmerized by the gentle tink tink tink of the stirring spoon against the side of the cup.

“I told you what happened to me when I was your age,” she said. “I told you about the man who chased me, how he hit me on the head and I ended up in that pond. I almost drowned that night. I touched death, and the experience left me a bit changed. And I have a feeling you know what I mean. It changed you too.”

She couldn’t be saying what I thought she was saying.

“It began with the Ripper,” she said. “Those of us with the ability recognized the signs. A killer who never showed up on CCTV. Pops up all over the place. No physical evidence. This same person gets into the BBC and delivers a package with a human kidney in it, and again, no one sees a thing. And just as mysteriously, he goes away. He turns out to be a person without a past? Without relations? No trace in the world? Not very likely, now, is it?”

She smiled, her mouth broad. She wore dark lipstick, a shade between red and orange. The color made my eyes throb. There was an unreality to all of this—the big kitchen, the high counter stools we sat on, the swirling oil painting by the window that I’d never noticed before. It was a painting of the sun, or maybe some snakes…how was I mistaking the sun for some snakes?

“Charlotte told me about the night you and she were attacked,” she went on. Her voice was so low, so calming. “She saw and heard nothing until the lamp came down on her head. And you were found in the toilets down the hall, all the mirrors shattered, the window broken. The door had to be broken down. What was the story? That the killer escaped through that broken window and ran? But Charlotte told me the protective bars on that window had just been repaired, because they had been loose. No. No living person escaped from that room. What you saw and what was reported, those were very different things, weren’t they?”

I could only nod. Jane let out a tiny, contented sigh.

“When did it happen?” she asked. “When did you get the sight?”

Ever realize you’ve been holding your breath? You think you’re breathing normally and then you just become aware that you’ve clenched your abdomen and the space around your heart is full and your lungs are filled to bursting and you let go…

I let go. Of all of it. Well, mostly all of it. I began with the night of the double event, when Jazza and I snuck through the bathroom window and went to Aldshot. How we ran back across the green in the middle of the night, and as we climbed back into Hawthorne, I saw a man that Jazza couldn’t see. And the next morning, they found a girl’s body on the green. When I got to the part where Stephen and Callum and Boo entered the picture, three words popped into my mind: Official Secrets Act. The terrible document I had to sign in the hospital, the one that made me promise that I would not talk about the squad under any circumstances. And while the Official Secrets Act might not have been written with people who saw ghosts in mind, it was still scary, and my signature was still on it. And I was pretty sure they were not joking when they said I really wasn’t supposed to say anything.

“Right after I got to England,” I said. “I choked at dinner. Stupid.”

“Not stupid. It happens how it happens. But I suspected you were one of us. That’s why I reached out to you. I wasn’t certain, but I felt it was very likely.”

“The trouble now,” I said, “is that I lie all the time.”

Jane nodded. “So tell me what really happened to you. Because I imagine this is what complicated your therapy before. You can tell me the whole story.”

“I don’t know how to talk about this,” I said. “I broke up with my boyfriend yesterday because of this.”

“I know the feeling. At first, I thought I was mad, so I lied to cover that up. But then, through some sheer effort of will, I convinced myself I was not mad. What I was seeing was real. Now, luckily for me, this was the late sixties—pretty much the best time to run away to London that there ever was. People were open then. There were squats to live in. The rock-and-roll world was vibrant, and yet strangely down to earth. If you hung out on the street long enough, you could meet pretty much anyone you wanted. And there were many mystics, and a lot of people on a lot of strange drugs. If you said you could see ghosts, well…people didn’t look at you quite so strangely. They either believed you or thought you were as high as they were. I knew, if I looked long enough and asked around, I would find more people like me. And I did. I found friends. And that changed everything for me. Everything. Rory, the things you’ve been through, with no one to talk to. Unless you know people like us? Surely, you must have met someone?”

“No,” I lied, again. “No one.”

“No wonder you feel so alone,” she said.

I started laughing—I mean, really laughing. I have no idea why, but I laughed until tears ran down my face.

“Why am I laughing?” I asked when I could catch my breath.

“Relief,” Jane said, patting my hand. “It’s relief. You’re not alone anymore. You’re one of us.”

Relief. Such a nice word. Such a sweet word.

“Who is us?” I said. “There are others?”

“Oh, yes,” Jane said. “Many others. And some live in this very house.”

She held up a finger, indicating that I should wait, and slid off the chair. She opened the kitchen door and called into the dark.

“Devina! Are you here? Mags?”

There was a high-pitched reply from somewhere in the house.

“Come down for a moment, won’t you?” She left the door cracked open and returned to her seat. I could hear a quick patter of footfall on the steps, and then a girl appeared in the door. She was very tall and very slender, with short silvery white-blond hair. Despite the chill, she wore a shift dress that exposed much of her very long legs. Her bony knees had scratches on them, like a little child’s knees. As a concession to the weather, she wore a cropped denim jacket and a pair of short boots.

“This is Devina,” Jane said.

“Hello.” Devina’s voice was high and light. Pixie-like.

“Is Mags in, darling? Or Jack?”

“Just me right now.”

“Devina also lives here,” Jane explained. “In fact, several people live here. The house has seven bedrooms and I find I can only sleep in one at a time. So I had the idea to share the house with people like us. Call it a home for the exceptionally sighted. Devina, be a dear and put that casserole in the oven? Rory needs a proper meal.”

Devina went to the fridge and pulled out a big blue casserole dish. I was staying for lunch, apparently.

“You cannot go back to Bristol,” Jane said, putting her hand on the table to mark her pronouncement. “You cannot go back to America. You need to be with people who understand, and people who can teach you. No one’s even taught you about your ability, have they? No. You must stay here. There’s another empty room upstairs. That one will be yours.”

“I can’t,” I said. “My parents…”

“Don’t know and won’t understand. They certainly won’t give permission for you to stay in a stranger’s house after you’ve been asked to leave school. You need to do something a bit bold and brave. You need to take things into your own hands. You need to leave.”

“You mean, like, run away?”

“I mean precisely that. It’s the only way. These are exceptional circumstances, and this is the answer to your problem. Thank goodness you came here in time.”

“It really is,” Devina said, nodding in agreement.

When you hear about people running away, I always imagined it just like that…like, they take off physically running into the night. I hate running, and I never really wanted to leave home, so the concept was entirely foreign to me.

“I know this is quite a lot to take on board, Rory, but if you’re brave and do this tonight, tomorrow will be the start of a wonderful new life. A life without lies. A life that makes sense.”

“Tonight?”

“It has to be tonight,” Jane said. “It sounds like they’ve already set the wheels in motion for you to be returned to your parents. It will be much harder after that. They’ve given you a night of freedom to think. You need to take advantage of it. And you’ll have us helping you. You’re not the first person I’ve helped.”

“She helped me,” Devina said. “Saved my life, coming here.”

“It doesn’t have to be permanent,” Jane said. “But, Rory, believe me, it’s easier when you’re part of a group. When you’re with people who understand. And we understand. It’s up to you, of course, but I speak from experience. So does Devina.”

It’s possible that I have a higher tolerance for crazy talk than most people because of my background. I’ve channeled multi-colored angels with my cousin and gone for discount waxes with my grandmother. I know two people who have started their own religions. One of my neighbors was arrested for sitting on top of the town equestrian statue dressed as Spider-Man. He just climbed up there with a few loaves of bread and tore them up and threw bread at anyone who got near him. Another neighbor puts up her Christmas decorations in August and goes caroling on Halloween to “fight the devil with song.” That’s just what things are like back home. While there were certain to be people back home who would fully accept my tales of seeing ghosts, they were also the same people who tended to see Jesus in their pancakes.

I could see this version of my future all too well. I would be fully absorbed into the crazy wavelength of Bénouville. Left to my native kind, I would get strange. But Jane was well-adjusted. She clearly had a happy and successful life. I didn’t know much about Devina, but she looked happy too. They looked normal. And nothing, nothing was sweeter than that. Jane was right—there was no other solution. This was the juncture, and I had to make a decision. Home, where my brain would go soft and I would forever wonder about what I was…or here, where I could at least learn something. And I could stay around Stephen and Callum and Boo.

I could even join them, on their own terms.

The light seemed to grow warm around us at the table.

“How?” I said. “I don’t know how to run away here, I mean, I know that sounds stupid, but…do I just not go back?”

“You don’t go back,” she said, “but we muddy your tracks. Who knew you came here?”

“Just Charlotte.”

“Good. Now, did you use your Oyster card to get here?”

“Yes.”

“Did you buy it with a credit card or cash?”

“My debit card…”

The Oyster card was the Tube pass. You put money on the card and then you just had to tap it on the reader when you got on and off at your stations so it knew how much to deduct. I saw what she was saying. It tracked your journey, and if you bought it on a credit card, there would be a record.

“I’ve done this before,” Jane said. “Just a few commonsense steps we need to take. Here’s what we will do…”

The plan crafted over the table was simple, and thorough. I would walk to the South Kensington Tube station and use the nearest ATM to withdraw all of the money in my account. It had to look like I needed it all. I would also be seen on the camera at the machine. Then I was to drop the Oyster card in front of the station. Someone would pick it up and use it, leaving a confusing trail on the Tube.

“Give your mobile to Devina,” Jane said. “She’ll take it and use it in a few locations around the city. Just drive around with it, D, then dispose of it.”

Out of all of this, not having the phone made me the most uncomfortable. I didn’t actually know anyone’s phone number—not my parents in Bristol, not Jazza, not Stephen. They were on the phone.

“I won’t be able to reach anyone,” I said.

“You can’t talk to anyone,” Jane replied. “Not at first. You’ll want to, but that puts the whole thing in jeopardy. We need the mobile.”

I’d left my coat in the vestibule. The phone was in the pocket.

“I’ll get it,” I said, getting up from the table. I made my way through the dark hallway, my eyes struggling in the change in the light, my heart slamming in my chest. I had to do this. Jane was right. She was the one person with an actual plan. And doing this—terrifying as it was—was the right decision. It was the only thing that would make my life make sense again.

The room spun gently, and I realized I was smiling. I didn’t feel happy, did I?

I knocked into the silver leopard as I fumbled for my coat and retrieved the phone. Boo’s number was still on the display. Boo’s was a good number to keep. I stared at it, committing it to memory. At least, trying to…seven, seven, three, four…

“Here.”

Devina was behind me, and her hand was already on the phone.

“I’ll take care of this now,” she said. She grabbed a set of keys from a bowl on a little shelf by the door. And then my phone was gone.

I continued chanting the number in my head and reached into my coat pocket again. I’d shoved a colored lip gloss in there the other day. I rolled up my sleeve and used the sticky gloss to write the number on my arm. It was messy, but I had it. I had one link.

It felt like cheating, but Jane didn’t know about Stephen. I still had secrets to keep, even now, as my life collapsed around me and re-formed into something new and very unfamiliar.

And strangely, for the first time in what seemed like a very long time, I felt like I knew what the hell was going on.

NEW DAWN PSYCHIC PARLOR,

EAST LONDON

DECEMBER 9

11:47 P.M.

PAUL WAS A CHEATING BASTARD. HE WAS THE KING OF cheating bastards. He should wear a crown.

Oh, everyone had warned her. Her sister. Her friends. Her horoscope. Everyone said Paul was trouble, but Lydia had believed him. She had believed the stories of his weekends away with his mates, his overtime at Boots doing stock inventory. She believed him when his car didn’t start and when he had a toothache. She was a trusting person, and everyone had warned her, and now it had come to this. The voice mail. The voice mail from some random slag that she heard when she accidentally but kind of on purpose got into his voice mail.

Okay, mostly on purpose. Paul was such an idiot. Only one password for everything. She’d seen him key it in dozens of times. All she had to do was ring the voice mail externally and put in the numbers, and there it was, the message from someone who just sounded orange. She was giggling away on his voice mail like a Big Brother reject.

Lydia wobbled on her heels as she hurried. It was hard to speed walk and cry. Bastard! Dawn would fix it. Dawn would tell her what to do. Dawn always knew what to do.

Dawn operated out of a third-story flat, which served as both home and office. She was there day and night. All you had to do was buzz up. It didn’t matter what time. Dawn dozed between clients. And even at this hour, there could sometimes be a wait—people would sit on the floor of the hallway by the door. Everyone who went to Dawn knew she was good. But there was no one else there tonight, and Lydia was able to go right in. Dawn was sitting in her easy chair, dressed in a pair of jogging bottoms, a red jumper, slippers, and a dressing gown. Lydia carefully made her way over, her heels catching in the thick salmon-colored carpet.

“Hello, my love,” Dawn said, setting down her magazine. “Come to see Dawn? Problems? I see all kinds of problems. Your aura is very dark, not like normal.”

Lydia took a seat at the small card table Dawn used for business. Dawn got up from her easy chair and took a seat on the folding chair on the opposite side.

“I think my boyfriend is cheating,” Lydia said tearfully. “What do I do?”

“Cheating? Well, we’ll ask the cards, love. They never lie. We’ll ask the cards and see what they say.”

Dawn reached over and took a small blue velvet drawstring sack from the windowsill and pulled it open, exposing the tarot deck. She held the deck for a moment in both hands and closed her eyes. This part always calmed Lydia—you could almost feel Dawn reaching out, pulling energy closer. Dawn opened her eyes very slowly and, without another word, began laying the initial spread. When the spread was complete, she leaned back and examined it like a surgeon evaluating a complex injury.

“All right, all right. Let us see. I’m looking back now, here’s your past. And right away, I’m seeing trouble with love. It’s right there.”

She pointed at the cards, and Lydia nodded.

“Present is the same. But the past…you’re an honest person. That’s what these cards are saying to me. You always try to tell the truth.”

“That’s true,” Lydia said, nodding.

“But not everyone does. Because honest people, sometimes they are taken in by liars. And I’m seeing that here, even in the past. I don’t think there was a lot of truth here.”

Lydia started crying again.

“So he is cheating,” she said.

“The cards say someone has not been telling you the truth for a long time.”

“Do they say who he’s cheating with?”

“Cards don’t talk like that, my love. Cards speak bigger truths.”

Dawn rocked to the side to adjust her dressing gown and continued.

“All right, my love. The cards are going to tell us what to do. The cards don’t lie. Let’s look and see what the future holds, yeah? Let’s see.”

Dawn laid down the remainder of the spread, topping it off with one final card. She placed the Tower down on the table and rocked back in her chair a bit.

“The cards are clear today,” she said, her voice grim. “Tower always mean big change is coming. Look.”

She pointed at the image of a tall stone tower being struck by lightning, causing it to explode and crumble.

“Always,” she said. “Look at the people falling. Everything falls apart with the tower. Everything has to change.”

“So, I have to…break up?”

“Something going to happen, love, something big. And I see lies. Someone was lying, and now everything going to change.”

“So you’re saying I should break up with him?”

“The cards say what they say. Somebody lying. Something is about to happen, something big.”

Lydia paid Dawn her twenty pounds and thanked her profusely. Everything was always clearer after she talked to Dawn. She took the phone from her pocket and walked down the street, her steps firm and full of purpose. Paul was going to answer some questions. Paul was going to feel her wrath right now. He didn’t pick up the first time she called, so she paused when she was almost at the corner and dialed again. And again. It took four tries before he answered.

“You cheating bastard,” she began. “I know…. Yes, I know. I heard the message…. What do you mean, what message? Her voice mail. Yes, I listened to your voice mail…. Well, if you didn’t do anything, then what’s the problem with me listening, yeah?”

“No! No!”

Someone was screaming—it sounded like Dawn. Lydia spun around just in time to see Dawn leaning out of her window much, much too far. And then in the next, unreal moment, she tumbled from the open window, headfirst, toward the pavement.

THE

FALLING

WOMAN

In a motion of night they massed nearer my post.

I hummed a short blues. When the stars went out

I studied my weapons system.

—John Berryman,

Dream Song 50,

“In a Motion of Night”

20

ACTUALLY, I HAD RUN AWAY ONCE BEFORE.

I must have been nine or so, and my parents wouldn’t take me to some event at the mall or something, and I got mad. I ran out of the house and went to Kroger. Our family friend Miss Gina, the one my uncle Bick has been “courting” for the last nineteen years or so, is the manager. I had this idea that she might let me live in the office or something. She let me sit in there and gave me some juice and carrot sticks. After about two hours, I got bored and went home. My parents must have known—Miss Gina probably called them the minute I showed up. She walked me home, and I went inside, right up to my room. I kept expecting my parents to come to the door and start yelling, but they never said one word to me about it.

My parents are clever like that. They knew I would do a better job of berating myself for being an idiot than they ever could and that waiting for the punishment was much worse than the actual punishment. The tick tick tick is much worse than the boom.

I thought about this when I woke up in the guest room at Jane’s and heard the tick tick tick of the bedside clock. Well, I thought about it after I figured out where the hell I was. It took me a few minutes to sort out which things in my head were reality and which were fantasy. The wallpaper, for example. In this room, it was a series of bronze circles that nested in each other. It was the kind of wallpaper that looked exciting and dramatic in the dark, because all you saw was the gold. In the morning, it was strange. And it was even on the ceiling. I had to stare at it for a while before I decided it went into the “real” column. I spent another few minutes considering the black lacquer bureau and the slightly gold-tinted mirror that rested on top of it. Also real.

And the heat. The house was warm. And also I was in a large bed, and yes, the blanket appeared to be some kind of fuzzy tiger print. I opened the (also black) curtains and some weak sunlight slithered in. I examined myself in the gold mirror. My eyes were bloodshot. My hair was a rat’s nest on one side. A hair tumor. That’s what I had.

“Awesome,” I said.

I returned to the bed and lifted up the bedside clock. Right before I had gone to sleep, I had transferred Boo’s number onto a piece of paper towel I’d snagged in the kitchen. There was a knock on my door, and a second later, it opened by itself. A dripping Devina stood there, dressed only in a towel. I balled the paper towel in my hand.

“I thought I heard you,” she said. “I just woke up myself. We tend to sleep late here, don’t worry. Jane’ll be up, though.”

“Is that you, Rory?” Jane called from downstairs.

“She’s awake!” Devina yelled back.

“Good morning! Do come down for something to eat!”

“I’ll see you down there,” Devina said, continuing to her room, leaving a trail of wet footprints in the carpet.

I felt the need to secure the number—to keep it with me. I was wearing borrowed pajamas with no pocket, so I tucked the number into the side of my underwear at my hip. Stupid, but it made me feel secure, like I was keeping my friends close.

There was music coming from the kitchen, nothing I recognized. Some kind of rock, not recent, but not bad. Jane was wearing something approaching normal today—pants and a white blouse. It was still a funky pants and white blouse, puffy in all kinds of unexpected places, full of more folds I couldn’t understand.

“Coffee or tea?” Jane asked pleasantly.

“Coffee, please.”

She poured me a cup from a French press that was ready and waiting.

“How do you feel this morning?”

“Kind of shocked,” I said.

“Yes, I remember the feeling. I ran away when I was your age. Took a night bus from up north. Slept on the bus. Woke up alone in London, ejected onto the streets in the pouring rain. I hope this was a slightly nicer way to face your first morning of freedom.”

She offered me the usual plate of baked goods, but I shook my head.

“I’m not really hungry,” I said. “I’m still kind of nervous.”

“Sure? I can make you what you like. An egg, some toast…no? All right then.”

“My parents,” I said. “They’re going to be really upset.”

“Undoubtedly so.” She nodded and leaned on the counter while she sipped her coffee. “But that will be temporary. And I have a recommendation. Write your parents a letter. Speaking to them on the phone will be too difficult right now. But you can express all you need to in a letter. Tell them you’re fine, that you just need some time. A letter will put them at ease.”

It sounded like good advice. I wrapped my hands around my mug and enjoyed the warmth.

“I’ve been thinking about our next steps,” she said. “It might be good for you to get away from London, just for a bit. This is where they’ll concentrate their search—not that it’s easy to find people in London. Moreover, I think you could use a change of scene. I own a property out in the country. It’s lovely this time of year. I was thinking we could drive there today. I’ll have some of the others come along, and you can get to know everyone. We always have a good time in the country.”

Running across London was one thing, but this idea of now running to the country seemed like…well, really running away.

“Darling, you’ve already done it,” she said. I guess she saw my hesitation. “In for a penny, in for a pound. The house is exquisite. It belonged to the people who owned this house. It was their family seat. This was just their London residence.”

“The people who owned this house?”

“Friends of mine,” she said. “They died in the early seventies and left it to me. They made my entire lifestyle possible, which is why I, too, like to share the wealth. Finish up your coffee and have a nice shower. We’ll leave whenever you’re ready. Devina will show you where the towels are. You’re just about Mags’s size, so you can have some of her clothes.”

The upstairs bathroom, like so much else in the house, was black. Shiny black tiles with shiny silver fixtures, a heated towel bar I burned my hand on, and a big, freestanding tub smack in the middle of the room, with a circular curtain to wrap around it. The showerhead was in the ceiling, so the water poured down on me like rain.

When I returned to my room in my towel, Devina was sitting in the middle of my bed reading a book. She was wearing a very long dress today, one that covered her feet. The denim jacket was back.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

“Hi. Clothes for you.”

A large pair of what seemed to be men’s jeans and an oversized sweater had been provided.

She made no indication that she was about to leave. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do—change here, or take my clothes back the bathroom. I decided to do that thing you do in gym (or, at least, the thing I do in gym) where you pull on your underwear under the towel. Then you maneuver into the bra with the towel on. Then you drop the towel and get into the rest of your clothes as quickly as possible.

“You going to be staying with us a while, then?” Devina asked.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” I said, fumbling on the bra.

“I didn’t either when I showed up.”

“How long ago was that?” The bra was being difficult and refusing to hook.

She stretched out and rolled onto her stomach.

“Oh…two years now? See, my mum had this boyfriend? Total bastard. Always creepy. Obviously creepy. A little too interested in me? And one night she went out and he started to get a little friendly. So I slapped him. And he slapped me back. I don’t think he meant to do it so hard, but he was pissed. I fell down a flight of stairs. Almost broke my neck. I managed to get myself up and out of the house and walk to A and E. And my mum actually blamed me, even after they banged him up for it.”

“Sorry,” I said. Though sorry didn’t seem to cover it.

“Don’t be. I met Jane because of what happened to me. I’m glad it happened. It made me stronger, better in the end. And now I have a real family.”

“You and Jane?”

“All of us,” she said.

“Who is all of us?”

“Oh, you’ll meet everyone. Jane’s helped a lot of people. You’ll see. She fixes people. She fixed me. I would have been a disaster if not for Jane. You’ll see.”

Devina smiled, and I noticed that she had extremely small teeth. Niblet teeth, like a child. I clutched the towel around my chest. Funny…I didn’t really care that much if Devina saw me in my underwear, but the scar, that was private.

“So,” I said, “I’ll just finish getting ready and…”

I think she got the hint. She slid off the bed.

“See you downstairs,” she said, wandering out of the room. I put on the jeans and sweater and sat on the end of the bed, kicking out my bare feet, trying to make sense of my life. If I was going to the country, it seemed wise to let someone know. I retrieved the phone number, which I had moved to the pocket of the jeans.

Boo was enough of a wild child to understand, and I felt certain that if I asked her to, she would keep the news to herself, or manage it in some way.

But I had no phone. The only one I had seen was in the kitchen. There wasn’t one in this bedroom. I would need to find one. I poked my head out of my room and had a look around. All the doors on the second floor were closed but mine and the bathroom. It didn’t seem right exactly to start poking into the bedrooms. The stairs went up to another floor. I decided to try that instead.

There were only three doors on the third floor, and the middle one was slightly open. I pushed it gently and stuck my head inside. This room was very large and, unlike the rest of the house, wasn’t quite as starkly black or white or silver. This one was pretty much what I imagined an Arabian spice market to be like, or maybe the tent of a king in the deserts of Morocco. Or something. Really, the room had no precedent.

The floor was covered in multiple Persian carpets, overlapping each other to form a soft but uneven patchwork surface. There were several low octagonal tables inlaid with mother of pearl and ebony, others made of multicolored tiles. But there were also Victorian elements—a yellow chaise lounge, a rose conversation chair. There were mirrors as well, two massive ones, leaning against the wall. The walls were full of built-in shelving, mostly filled with books. One wall contained records. There was a large wooden cabinet that appeared to have built-in speakers, but not speakers like I had ever seen before. It had to be an antique. The table was covered in pots and bowls and ashtrays, dancing golden Shivas, and three alabaster chalices.

Despite the sensory overload, I managed to find a telephone. A dial telephone, no less, and a receiver with a spiral cord. And it was heavy, some kind of special, fancy plastic that probably could have deflected a bullet. Dialing a phone is ridiculous. You have to spin the wheel for every number and wait until it rotates back into position before you can dial the next one. The receiver, along with being weighty, was also massive, easily as long as my head. The past, I decided, was a complicated place.

Boo answered on the first ring with a cautious and confused, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“What number is this? It says blocked.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of…left?”

She paused for a moment. Then it sounded like she was moving away and closing a door.

“Left?” she said.

“Ran away. Took off. You know.”

“You didn’t,” Boo said. “Seriously?”

“Very seriously. They were going to kick me out, and I couldn’t go to Bristol. I couldn’t go home. So I left.”

“My God, you don’t do things by half, do you? We’ve been trying to call you all morning. Something’s happened near your school.”

“What? Is everyone okay? What happened?”

“It wasn’t at your school,” she said. “Just nearby. A woman died…it’s a strange one.”

“Is it related to the other thing?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet. That’s what we’re trying to work out. Where are you? We’ll come get you.”

“I’ll come to you,” I said. “Just tell Stephen I was out and forgot my phone, okay? Don’t tell him what I just told you. I’ll tell him myself.”

“Have you been taking Stephen lessons?”

“Seriously. Let me. I don’t think he’s going to take the news well.”

“You’re probably right,” she said. “Fine. I’ll cover, but get over here, yeah?”

As I replaced the extremely big receiver on its base, I heard someone in the doorway behind me.

“Oh, here you are,” Jane said. “Phoning someone?”

“Sorry,” I replied. It wasn’t like I could deny it. “I know you said, but…it was just a friend.”

“No need to apologize. I understand the impulse.”

Her words said one thing, but her demeanor suggested another. Her face tightened a bit, like she was clenching her jaw a little. I understood why she would be mad. She was putting herself at risk to help me, and here I was breaking the rules and sneaking around her house. And I was about to break another of those rules.

“Before I go,” I said, “there’s just one thing I have to do. I have to meet someone.”

“I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Jane said, “but in my experience, it’s usually best not to do that, not at this juncture. Friends tend to report things back to authorities.”

“Not these friends,” I said. “I promise. They won’t say a word. And I’ll be careful. I just need a few hours.”

“If you feel you have to,” Jane said, her face relaxing into a reassuring smile, “then do what’s right for you. I’m glad you came up here, actually. This is my favorite room. I wanted you to see it. This, as you can see, is the library. Lots of classic works of spiritualism, many not so classic works. And I keep the vinyl records up here, along with the turntable. As I told you, my friends and I were very involved with the rock-and-roll scene. We had just about every album that came out between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies. It’s quite a collection. I suppose they’d be worth something, as they’re all original, but I’d never sell them. And they’re not pristine. We played our albums until they wore out. We weren’t gentle with them.”

She smiled lightly at the memory, then went over to the shelves and fished something out of a bowl. She held up a silver Zippo lighter.

“Mick Jagger’s cigarette lighter. He left it here one night. We have all sorts of things like that in here. I’ll show them all to you when we get back—that’s if you’re interested. You probably wouldn’t even know who most of the people are. I know this house must look odd to you. The early seventies were quite an unusual time.”

“I like unusual,” I said.

“That’s an excellent quality, and one that will certainly help, considering who we are. Now, if you’re going to go out, I think Mags has a coat that would fit you. And let’s find a hat and sunglasses as well. Devina can drive you wherever you need to go.”

In the end, I was outfitted in a red coat, something they called a “bobble hat,” and a big pair of shades. When I looked at myself in the mirror by the door, I was greeted by a bright red buglike object in a big wool hat with a puff on the top. It was definitely not my usual look.

There were two cars in front of Jane’s house—a buttery yellow Jaguar, clearly a classic from some other era, and a modern, more practical black car. We took the newer one.

“Where do you need to go?” Devina said.

I didn’t want her to take me directly to the flat, so I asked her to drop me at Waterloo station. Devina didn’t talk when she drove. She blasted music, and she drove fast. She tailgated, and she played chicken with every light, only screeching to a halt on red at the last moment. On the positive side, though, I did get there very quickly.

“I’ll wait here,” she said.

“I…um…It could be a while?”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I have a book.”

“No, I mean, really a while? I can get back on my own. No one’s going to recognize me in this.”

Devina shrugged. As soon as I was out of the car, she sped off. I hurried over to the flat. I buzzed up and took the steps two at a time, slipping on some slick pizza menus and falling in the process.

“Where have you been all morning?” Stephen asked as he let me in. “We’ve been calling. And—”

“I was out,” I said. “Forgot my phone.”

“Isn’t this exam week?”

“I don’t have one now,” I said. “Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

Boo’s eyes met mine from across the room. She took in the hat and the coat.

“There’s been a death in the Wexford neighborhood,” Callum said. “About a five-minute walk from your building.”

“The facts are these,” Stephen said, waving me to the sofa. I sat down as he picked up his computer. He clicked through a few documents. “Just before midnight last night, a woman named Lydia George went in to have her tarot cards read by a woman named Dawn Somner. Dawn was a psychic who operated out of her flat. The reading ended around quarter past. Lydia left Dawn’s flat and proceeded down the street while making a phone call. She was just on the corner, about twenty yards from Dawn’s door, when she heard Dawn scream ‘no, no.’ Immediately afterward, Dawn toppled headfirst out of the window. At this point, Lydia fainted. All of this is confirmed by a second witness, named Jack Brackell. He was standing there, directly opposite, waiting for a ride from a friend. It’s when we get to Jack Brackell’s story that it becomes of interest to us.

“Jack Brackell had the vantage point. He saw Dawn open the window and that she was acting like someone being pushed or forced—his words—but that there was no one behind her or next to her that he could see. He also reports that Dawn shouted ‘no, no’ and then fell from the window. He ran to her at once, but it appeared that she was dead. He phoned 999 and remained on the spot. No one emerged from the building. The ambulance arrived four minutes later, declaring Dawn dead at the scene; the police arrived two minutes after that. They secured the premises. No one else was home in the other two flats. Her flat was found to be absolutely in order, no signs of struggle or violence of any kind. The case isn’t closed yet, but the notes indicate that it’s believed to have been an accident—that what Jack Brackell saw was Dawn trying to stop herself from falling. They think she probably got her dressing gown caught on the radiator when she was opening the window. The gown was long and had holes at the bottom. She struggled to get it loose and lost her balance.”

“But you think different?” I asked.

“Because of the proximity to Wexford and this detail of Jack’s, we think it’s worth looking into. I made you a promise. I told you we would keep you informed.”

“And if there is something in there,” Callum added, “we need you.”

We need you. Three little words.

“If you want to come,” Boo added.

“Of course I want to come,” I said automatically. There was no way I was going away with Jane until I found out what this was about.

21

DAWN’S FLAT WAS INDEED NEAR WEXFORD, OVER BY Goulston Street. It was on a street not often frequented by Wexford students, but I still hurried from the car to the door, well wrapped in my borrowed red coat and bobble hat.

We searched the building first. It wasn’t a large building, so the checks were easy enough to do. Stephen gained admittance to the first apartment by showing his warrant card, while Boo jimmied open the locked door of another using a credit card. The basement was a storage area with no lock on the door. We found nothing—no ghosts.

Dawn’s was the top-floor flat, the outside decorated with a doormat with a picture of the moon and stars and a piece of blue-and-white police tape. Stephen distributed latex gloves to Callum and Boo, but when he was about to hand me mine, both he and I seemed to realize the potential problem.

“I suppose,” he said, “we don’t know if you can have these, do we?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, the scene’s been processed, and it’s unlikely anyone is going to come back to have another look. Just be careful what you touch.”

We ducked under the police tape one by one. The whole flat was thickly carpeted in a pinkish-salmon color and smelled of burning sage. The decorations were a bit wizardy—the walls had been papered in a pattern of white with small silver stars. The gauzy silver curtains, the small tables with hunks of crystals looking like strange moon fruit, the incense burners and framed pictures of astrological signs. Two widths of beaded curtain sealed off the rest of the flat—the kitchenette, bedroom, and bathroom. It was an all-in-one live and work space.

“Looks like my cousin’s house,” I said. “Except more weird. Which is saying something.”

Pictures had been removed from their hooks and neatly set on the floor, facing the wall. Three of the chairs had been turned upside down—not as if knocked over, but neatly flipped and placed in a row. A small decorative table had been set on top of another, slightly larger decorative table. The gemstones were arranged in a triangular pattern on the floor.

“Is anyone in here?” Stephen called. “Anyone at all? Make yourself known.”

That brought no response, not that I thought he was really expecting one.

We all stepped a bit further into the main room. Callum and Boo walked over to the beaded curtain. Boo drew them back and looked through the kitchen, then she and Callum stepped through and proceeded on to the bedroom. Stephen had a look at the window itself, looking at the radiator at the base, the locks, how it opened.

“No one here,” Callum said, poking his head through the beaded curtain.

“Just have a look around,” Stephen said. “See if there’s anything in there that seems off.”

I was just standing in the middle of the living room with nothing to do, so I went over to what I assumed was the reading table (it was covered in a purple velvet cloth). My cousin Diane, the one who operates the Healing Angel Ministry out of her house, loves tarot cards. She taught me to read them when I was twelve, when my parents had to go away to a seminar and I stayed with her for a week. While Cousin Diane was sure that the angels were speaking through the tarot cards, I was slightly more convinced that you just learn what the symbols are supposed to mean and make up a story. It’s actually really easy. You start interpreting, and you watch people to see if they are responding. You normally say something like, “There are three things going on in your life right now that you need to deal with.” There are always three things going on in people’s lives that they have to deal with. People will fill in the blanks for you and tell you how amazing you are. I read cards at summer camp for two years in a row. I was so popular with the cards that I convinced my junior counselor to let me skip archery and gymnastics and sit in the games bunk and do readings. I am bad at cartwheels and shooting arrows, but I am good with tarot cards.

It was odd how these cards were spread out—the entire deck on display. And there was something odd about them that I couldn’t place. Something was wrong with this deck.

“Didn’t you say she had just done a reading?” I asked Stephen.

“She had, yes.”

“How long before?”

“A few minutes.”

This wasn’t how you stored tarot cards. Usually card readers stack their cards carefully, and they often store them in special bags or boxes. They don’t just drop them all over the table.

“Can I touch these?” I asked Stephen. “Everyone who has had a reading has touched this deck, so it’s probably covered in fingerprints anyway.”

“I suppose that’s fine. Just be careful.”

The sleeves of the coat were slightly too long for me and covered my hands, so I slipped it off and put it on the table. I used one finger to slide the cards around, sorting them into major and minor arcana. The minor arcana are the ones like normal playing cards, with suits (wands, swords, plates, and cups) and numbers, kings, queens, and princes. The major arcana are the ones with the titles and the more complicated meanings—Death, Love, the Star, the Sun, the Wheel of Fortune. The major arcana are all numbered, and they go in a certain order. Twelve, the Hanged Man. Thirteen, Death. Fourteen, Temperance. Fifteen, the Devil. Sixteen…

One was missing. The Tower.

A lot of people think that Death or the Hanged Man are the cards in tarot to watch out for, but the real baddie is the Tower. And even though I didn’t believe in tarot cards, I took their significance seriously in order to do readings. The missing Tower gave me pause. I looked on the floor, the chairs. I looked on the chair and the shelves, anywhere a card may have been set down.

Boo and Callum had returned from their examinations of the kitchen and bedroom.

“Nothing,” Boo said. “It’s neat and tidy in there. This is the only room that’s been disturbed.”

“A card is missing,” I said.

“She certainly could have caught her dressing gown on the valve here,” Stephen said, pointing at the radiator. “Or she could have tripped over the cord of the floor lamp.”

“A card is missing,” I said again, louder.

“How do you know?” Callum asked.

“I read cards,” I said.

“You what?” Stephen said.

“My cousin,” I explained. “Owns an angel ministry? She taught me. And a card is missing. Not just any card either. The Tower.”

“It can’t be a coincidence that this woman is a psychic,” Boo said.

Stephen got up and shook his head.

“What?” Boo said.

“I don’t believe in psychics.”

“You see ghosts, and yet you don’t believe in psychics?” Boo asked.

“Correct.”

“How does that work?”

“Because I have seen a ghost,” he said. “I have abundant proof of their existence. Whereas I have no proof that any psychic, ever, has seen the future. They work through a series of suggestions and guesses.”

“I had my cards read, and it was dead-on,” Boo said.

“Which doesn’t disprove my point.”

I left them to debate the issue. People who do tarot often have books about tarot lying around. There were none in this room (which made sense—you don’t want to keep a copy of How to Read Tarot Cards around if you’re supposed to be an expert). No, you kept that stuff private. The bedroom maybe. I went through the beaded curtain, through the little hallway kitchen, into a very tight and dark bedroom with a claustrophobic floral wallpaper and a disturbing collection of stuffed animals lining all the surfaces. I found a pile of books by the side of the bed—books on crystal healing, color therapy, chakras. A bit more digging through the pile turned up books on popular psychology and reading body language. And sure enough, three books on tarot cards. I found the one with the best color reproductions of the cards and flipped through until I got to the Tower, and when I did, I actually let out a gasp.

Stephen and Boo were still having at it when I came back in with the book. It took me several tries and a progressively louder voice to get their attention.

“Listen,” I said, holding up the book. “What does this look like to you?”

The Tower is an image of, as you might suspect, a tower. In many drawings, the tower is hit by lightning and is crumbling. But in almost every picture of the Tower, there is also the image of a person falling, usually headfirst. That’s how it was depicted in this book.

“A woman falls headfirst out of a window,” I said as they gathered around. “The one card missing is the one with a picture of a woman falling headfirst out of a window. What does that say to you?”

I was gratified by their stunned expressions.

“Definitely not good things,” Callum said. “Nice one, Rory.”

“And,” Boo said, “another connection to the cards.”

“This is no doubt important,” Stephen said. “But I refuse to believe these cards are magic.”

“Rory said she reads cards,” Boo pointed out.

“Yeah, but I make it all up,” I said. “The cards all have some meanings ascribed to them, but the way you do the reading is to make up a story based on what you see. The cards can mean a lot of different things, so you can go off of what people tell you. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe some people have some ability, but I didn’t. And I found all kinds of stuff in her room about reading body language and things like that.”

Stephen held out his hands as if to say, “This is my point.”

“All right,” Boo said, holding up her hand. “Fine. Maybe whatever was in her flat takes offense to people who claim they are dealing with the spirit world when they aren’t? Maybe it was looking for a way to communicate. If you’re a ghost and you’re afraid, you can’t speak to anyone…maybe you look for someone who you think can see or hear you. You go to a psychic, and when the person can’t help you, you get upset.”

“And you fling her out the window,” Callum said. “That does sound possible, at least.”

“There is a logic to that,” Stephen said, frowning. “Something to consider.”

“But…?” Boo said.

“But what bothers me is the display,” Stephen said. “It’s so organized. The ghost we met in the basement was not organized.”

“Different ghost,” Callum said.

“Yes, but why go to all this trouble?” Stephen said. “The last one was, presumably, trying to protect its burial site. If this is a ghost, what’s it trying to accomplish? What’s it trying to say? Look at this. This isn’t an angry scene. It’s just a very odd one.”

“Mental ghosts,” Callum said. “Bound to be odd.”

“But not all ghosts kill,” Stephen said. “Before the Ripper, had we ever met one that killed?”

“We hadn’t,” Boo said. “It’s true.”

“But I’ve certainly met a few that could kill people,” Callum said. “Even if they weren’t successful, they were certainly capable. You forget I got this way because one tried to do me in with live electricity.”

“I just think it’s odd that we have two deaths resulting from what would clearly have to be two separate ghosts,” Stephen said. “Given that the majority don’t kill, to have two for two—”

“I’ll say it again: mental ghosts. From Bedlam.”

“Not all mental patients kill, either, you know. Homicide is not the inevitable outcome of all mental impairment. And this scene…it’s just not right somehow. Why did this scene change after the police left?”

He went over to the window again and opened and closed it, looking for some kind of answer in the motion.

“Do you know Charles Manson?” he finally said. “American serial killer from the late nineteen sixties? He had a large group of followers called the Manson Family who murdered several people on his command—random people. Strangers. The scenes were famous for their brutality and strangeness, and Manson planned it that way. He told his followers to kill everyone in the houses they went into and to leave behind ‘something witchy.’ So they did things to deliberately make the scenes horrific and perverse. That’s what this reminds me of. It’s something witchy. The death of a psychic. A death that mirrors the image on a tarot card. A scene that changes like a magic trick after the police leave, as if whoever did this knew someone else was coming afterward.”

His phone rang, and he took it from his pocket. His conversation was short and terse, with a few “yes, sir”s and “I see” and then a deeper “I see. Yes. I’ll do that.”

When he looked right at me, I knew.

“Boo, Callum, would you mind going to the car?” he said. “We’ll meet you there in a minute. I have to speak to Rory for a moment.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as Boo and Callum left us.

“That was Thorpe,” Stephen said, holding up the phone, like Thorpe was actually inside and might reach out and wave to me.

“Wexford has reported you as missing,” Stephen said. “You were last seen leaving with a bag at midnight by a prefect who is now, presumably, in a great deal of trouble.”

“Funny story—”

“It’s not a funny story. Rory, what the bloody hell are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that they’re kicking me out,” I said. “I told you I was failing. Then it was back to Bristol and then back home, where I go insane.”

“Where were you last night?”

“With a friend. I didn’t have a choice. You yourself said I couldn’t stay in Bristol. You know I can’t go back. I need to be here, right? Especially, you know, since there’s a big crack under the building that might be puking up dangerous ghosts, so…”

“I’m waiting for you to finish that sentence.”

I swallowed before saying it.

“I should join you guys. Now.”

“It’s not something I can decide,” he said quietly. “I don’t get the final say.”

“Yes you do. You said you do.”

“I advise. Thorpe makes the call, along with his superiors.”

“So tell Thorpe to hire me. I’m suited for it. Like, more than anyone.”

“I’m not sure anyone’s suited to it,” he said.

“But if you were going to hire anyone…”

“Why would you even want to do this job? Just because you’re suited to something doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing.”

“So why do you do it?” I asked. “You went to Eton. You could have gone to university. You could do anything you wanted.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is that simple. I just got booted from Wexford. My parents are never going to let me come back to London if I leave. Which means I am screwed and you are screwed, so really, when you think about it that way, it is very, very simple.”

“So,” he said, “you think it’s just like that? You think you just join because school isn’t working out?”

“That’s what I just said, basically. Yes.”

“Do you realize what it entails?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “I mean, it can’t be much worse than what I’ve already experienced. I’ve been stabbed by the Ripper and turned into a terminus. Do you have some more surprises in store? More than that?”

“You need to go back. Right now. Before this gets any more serious.”

“I’m not going back,” I said. “You know I can’t.”

“You can. You can walk back there right now. They’ve already expelled you, so there’s no harm done.”

“Except my parents probably know I ran away.”

“And they’ll be much happier to know you’ve returned.”

“Why are you being like this?” I asked. “If you hadn’t listened to me, there would still be an insane ghost in the basement of the pub. And now a woman’s been thrown out of a window.”

“I know,” he said. “I realize you were right. You don’t need to keep reminding me.”

“Are you angry because I was right about the last one?”

“Why would I be angry about that?”

“Because,” I said, “I knew, and you didn’t. I did something about it.”

He started to laugh. Really, actually laugh. I had never seen Stephen just break down laughing before. It would have been great under any other circumstance, but not this one.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“It’s not funny.”

“So why are you laughing?”

“Trust me, I find nothing funny about any of this.”

I was filled with the urge to haul off and smack him—I mean really knock him across his face, just to make him stop. I even stepped closer to him, but I didn’t swing, because I’m not like that. But I felt the impulse. Just to bring the flat of my palm against his face, those slightly hollowed-out cheeks. Put some life into that pale skin in the form of a big, red handprint.

“You don’t think I’m capable?” I said.

“I never said you weren’t capable.”

My words were jumping around inside of me, bouncing around my veins, punching my heart, pressing at the backs of my eyes.

“I’m the one who can hold her own,” I said. “That’s why you brought me here. That’s why you tested me. And now I’m here, and I’m willing to help, and you won’t let me. I bet Thorpe would hire me. He knows what I can do. They need me more than they need you.”

I said it because I was angry, not because I meant it. I said it because I knew that I had to get to him somehow, to make him react—but he didn’t. He just made a slow circuit around Dawn’s table, examining the cards. He leaned low over them for a moment, staring at them closely.

“It’s time for us to go,” he said, after a moment. “And it’s time for you to go back to Wexford. That’s the end of it.”

I think he knew how keyed up I was and that the calmer his reply, the more the wiring in my head would fizz and burn until I just shorted out and did what he wanted. But I wasn’t going to play that game. I took a deep breath, dug my nails hard into my palm, and said, “Sure.”

He locked the door behind us, and we stepped over to the car, where Callum and Boo stared at us. Boo held up the missing card.

“Right,” Stephen said. “We have work to do. Rory will be returning to school. Would you like us to take you back, or would you prefer to go yourself?”

There was an archness in his tone that infuriated me all over again. Callum looked understandably baffled, and Boo immediately turned her attention to the window of the car.

“I’m fine,” I snapped. I tried to remain dignified as I walked off, but it was starting to wear on me, all of these arguments, all of the fighting. Jane had promised me the country, and now I was ready to go.

22

OF COURSE, I WASN’T GOING BACK TO SCHOOL. AND OF course, it rained. It always rained. And it was a particularly miserable December rain at that. Louisiana rain often cracks a day in half, bringing a welcome reprieve from the heat. Sometimes it rains on a sunny day, and sometimes it brings a dramatic storm that turns the sky green and splits it with lightning. English rain feels obligatory, like paperwork. It dampens already damp days and slicks the stones. I went to Liverpool Street and got one of the many cabs in the line. Cabs, as Jane had informed me yesterday, kept records of journeys, and some had cameras. I wore the hat and glasses and divided the journey into two sections, changing cabs at Leicester Square.

I tried to reason out Stephen’s little tantrum. Stephen liked rules. He wanted to feel in control. Callum and Boo…they would welcome me with open arms. They would work on him. I’d bide my time for a bit, go with Jane to the country. I’d learn something about this condition I had. I’d come back even more valuable than when I left. Everything was going to be fine.

“There you are,” Jane said, as she let me in. “We were worried you weren’t going to come back. Is everything all right?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear it. Come through to the kitchen. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

There was a guy in the kitchen, a little older than me, maybe in his twenties. To say that he was striking looking wouldn’t quite have covered it. He was the human equivalent of Jane’s décor. His hair was bright blond, like yellow gold, as artificially colored as Jane’s and just as striking in its unnatural glow. And it was extremely well groomed in a sideways sweep, like some kind of old movie star. He wore a red dress shirt and a strangely wide tie in a bold red and silver stripe. I don’t think that the color of someone’s eyes tells you anything in particular about them, but Jack had cold, clear blue eyes. The blue was almost as unnatural as his hair. And his shoes were red with metallic silver stars worked into the leather. The entire effect was outlandish, costumish.

“Rory,” Jane said, “I want you to meet Jack.”

“Pleasure,” Jack said, extending his hand. I shook it, and Jack smiled at me as if I was the punch line to a very funny, very private joke.

“Jack will be coming with us,” Jane said.

“It’s an amazing house,” Jack said. He learned against the kitchen table, crossing one leg over the other and the ankle. Kind of a dancer’s stance, or the kind of thing you see in old movie stills. A pose.

“Are you all right?” Jane said, leaning in to look at me. “You look pale. Have a little something to eat—you look like you might fall over.”

She pushed forward the ubiquitous plate of baked goods. Jack’s smile widened, and he looked at the floor, as if it might also find this funny.

“You have quite an interesting story,” Jack said. “Jane’s been telling us all about you.”

“I think you all have interesting stories,” Jane said. “We are all interesting people.”

“True,” Jack said, inclining his head in acceptance. He bit his lower lip just a little and looked up at me.

I can say this about myself—I don’t often meet people and just not like them. That’s not my way. But there was something about Jack I really didn’t like, and it wasn’t just that he seemed like some kind of costumed character from a weird play. He hadn’t said or done much, but something about him was off and unpleasant, and the fact that he was coming to the country with us made the country considerably less appealing. This made no real sense, and I didn’t really have much of a choice about the matter. It was just an immediate feeling, a bit of a chill.

“I just need to use the bathroom,” I said. Which was true. I also wanted a moment to shake this feeling off.

I left the kitchen and went down the hall to the stairs. The house was encased in the thick afternoon gloom. The lack of hall windows meant it was very dark. I was about to turn to go up the stairs, and I guess I looked over at the silver leopard, when I noticed something else. I just caught it in the corner of my vision, and I had to stop myself and go into the vestibule to confirm what I’d seen. It was a Wexford blazer on a hook by the door. I’d seen so many Wexford blazers on so many hooks that now the shape of it was imprinted on my mind, and there was no mistake about this one. But I hadn’t worn my blazer to Jane’s.

I lifted it off the hook and examined it. Because of the laundry system, all of our uniforms were all labeled with our names. I looked inside the collar for the familiar white stripe of label.

The blazer was Charlotte’s. And it was damp.

Which made sense. Charlotte came her for therapy. But Charlotte was, at this moment, in a Latin exam.

“Something wrong?”

Jane was in the hallway.

“Oh…” I didn’t know what to say. Was something wrong? “It’s just…Charlotte’s blazer. Is here.”

I lifted the sleeve as proof.

“Oh yes. She came by earlier. She must have left it.”

“She has a Latin exam today,” I said. “It’s all exams today.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jane said. “She was here, but she didn’t stay, and she didn’t say anything about her exams. I think she was a bit upset you didn’t come back last night. You should get ready to go. We’ll want to hurry. Miss the traffic.”

That made sense. Charlotte turned to Jane for everything. I nodded and left the blazer and went upstairs.

But it wasn’t okay. There was a flutter in my chest. My heart was skittering. Julia called this “victim’s instinct.” Once a really bad thing happens to you, your senses heighten. You become very attuned to things that aren’t quite right, things that are potentially dangerous.

I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I needed to think.

Sure, Charlotte could have come here, but to miss an exam? And that blazer was wet, not damp. There was a radiator in the vestibule. Had the blazer been here for a while, it would have been warm and drier. And Charlotte wasn’t the kind of person to just leave her blazer. Our blazers were the key part of the Wexford uniform. Putting them on—it was an automatic gesture.

But sure, she could have left it. It was possible.

What was the alternative?

The bathroom window was frosted for privacy. I unlocked it and tried to pull it up, but it made a very loud squeaking noise. I stopped, my nerves jangled. Then I turned on the faucet all the way and went back to the window, nudging it millimeter by millimeter until I had about three inches of room to peer out of. The bathroom faced the back and was a sheer drop down to the garden. There was certainly no way out through here. I could scream…

…. but there was no reason to scream, was there? Why did I want to scream?

Why had Jack smiled at me like that? It was just when Jane offered me the tray of cookies and brownies. That was normal. Jane always offered me that.

Then a thought came into my head that seemed both very, very paranoid and very, very logical. Every time I came to Jane’s she insisted that I eat something. And every time I ate something, I started to feel lightheaded. I would talk a lot. Time seemed weird.

I don’t take drugs myself, but I’ve heard stories from friends who’d had pot brownies, and it seemed like this was the kind of thing that happened. It didn’t hit all at once—it took about a half an hour or so—but then the talking, the strange things I’d notice in the room. It wasn’t like I was rendered unconscious, but I definitely relaxed to a degree that therapy had never before relaxed me.

Charlotte had that look when she came from Jane’s as well. The glass-eyed stare…

If what I was thinking was correct, no wonder Jane seemed so amazingly good at her job. She had gotten us high as kites.

But why? This was insane. These thoughts were the thoughts of a crazy person.

But my life was not normal. I was not normal. And neither was Jane, or Devina, or Jack…

Jack had been the name of the witness in Dawn’s murder.

Okay, that was a stupid connection. Loads of people are named Jack.

I flushed the toilet just for the noise. I exited the bathroom and went to the top of the stairs. Jane was waiting for me at the bottom.

“Rory,” she said. “Ready to go? Why don’t you come down?”

Why don’t you come down?

Her words, her voice, they filled me with dread now—a dread I wanted so much to discount, but I just couldn’t. I had absolutely no idea what was happening, but something was wrong. But I had to go downstairs. I couldn’t leave from the second floor anyway unless I leapt from a window, like Dawn.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Sorry. I was drying myself off.”

I don’t think I sounded casual. Jack came around. He was next to the staircase, watching me descend as well.

My heartbeat was irregular, catching in my throat. I took each step at about half speed. This was wrong. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Something had to happen now, on these steps, at this second. Every fiber of my being screamed it to me.

So I listened.

When I reached the bottom step, I opened my mouth as if I were about to speak to Jane, then I broke toward the door. It’s a strange thing to me, running. I only do it in my dreams, and I have often joked that I would only engage in the activity if being chased. This definitely had a dreamlike quality, running into the dark hall- way, feeling the arms grab me from behind. I landed face first on the floor, completely in someone’s grip. My nose smashed into the floorboards, sending a singing pain throughout my face. My eyes welled up from the impact and tears flowed freely.

“Careful!” Jane said. “By God, Jack, don’t hurt her. Get her up.”

Two pairs of hands picked me up. Devina had come out of nowhere, and she and Jack got me off the floor.

“Now, Rory,” Jane said, “don’t struggle like that. Jack will have to use more force, and neither of us want that. Move her to the kitchen.”

I was half-dragged, half-carried to the kitchen. And strangely, I relaxed a bit. There was a certain relief in just being right, the thing was now just happening. The tick tick had lead to the boom. I scanned the counter. There was nothing useful there. The knives were all the way on the other side of the kitchen. Unless I was going to beat Jack and Devina with a plate of baked goods or a magazine, I was stuck.

“Eat something,” Jane said, presenting the plate once again. “It will make it easier.”

“What’s in there?”

“It’s just a little hash, darling,” she said. “You’ve been enjoying them so far. Perfectly harmless.”

She held up the plate, and I shook my head. She shrugged and set it down.

“Up to you,” she said. “It was for your benefit.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“No harm will come to you if you cooperate. I can promise that. Anyone with the sight is my brother or sister, and I take that very, very seriously. If you struggle, Jack will hurt you. But if you remain calm, you will be released.”

That wasn’t much of a choice, so I stopped struggling. Jane nodded and Devina released me at once.

“Jack,” Jane said, “let her go.”

The grip remained.

“Jack. I said let her go.”

My arms were released. Jane reached over and rubbed them. “My apologies,” she said. “My apologies. Truly. The things that have happened in the last twenty-four hours, they were not part of the original plan. With the news that you would likely be departing soon, we had to work very quickly. I’ve always been honest with you, Rory, and I’ll continue to be honest with you. Everything about your old life ends right now. The sooner you accept that, the easier things will be for you. But what happens next…that’s really up to you. And I’ve come to explain the possibilities. The good news is, the possibilities are much, much better than your current state of affairs.”

“Where’s Charlotte?” I asked.

“Charlotte is in a safe place. She’s already gone off to the country. You’ll see her today. She’s absolutely fine. She knew that you came here, and we couldn’t have that knowledge getting around. So we had to take her along as well. But I assure you she’ll remain safe as long as you remain with us. You’re a terminus, the first instance of a human terminus that I’ve ever come across. We’re all very excited about it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, Rory,” she said. “We’ve been with you for weeks. We followed you to Bristol. We’ve seen how special you are. And now everything is coming together. You are the sign we’ve been waiting for. You’ll help us, and we’ll help you.”

“I don’t want to help you.”

“You care about Charlotte, and those friends of yours in the flat near Waterloo, and…what’s the address again, Jack?

“Seventy-seven Woodland Road,” he said.

That was, in fact, my parents’ address in Bristol. He then rattled off our home address in Louisiana, my Uncle Bick’s address, my Aunt Diane’s address, and my parents’ work addresses, both in England and in America. And that’s when everything got very cold.

“Which is why I say that everything is different now,” Jane said. “We don’t want to force you. Come of your own will. And once you come with us, you’ll see. You’ll see that what we’re doing is right. You’ll be glad. It’s just an awkward adjustment period, but it won’t last. Come now. It’s time to go. Time to go to the country.”

23

AS IT HAPPENS, I KNOW A BIT ABOUT SURVIVAL. TO A POINT, I know this because I come from Bénouville, Louisiana, where hurricane preparedness is a topic of conversation every summer. Did you stock up on bottled water? Batteries? Canned food and granola bars? Do you have bleach for when the water goes down and the mold comes? Do you have a radio? Flashlights?

But the nitty-gritty stuff I know because my neighbor is a nutjob. A nutjob with a lot of practical skills. I mean Billy Mack, who lives down the street.

Billy was never quite the same after Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people weren’t the same after that. A lot of people went without food and water and help, and a lot of people developed an interest in survival skills. Billy Mack took this to an extreme. He has a boat on his porch roof, tethered to one of the second-story windows. Billy is also the founder of the People’s Church of Universal People, a religion he runs out of his garage. As part of his mission, he sometimes goes up and down the street, handing out pamphlets. His religion is a kind of apocalypse-come-hither thing mixed with the Army Rangers field guide. He believes that the end times are coming, and people in his religion will not only be right with God, but they’ll have the proper supplies on hand.

I don’t spend a lot of time with Billy Mack, but we get the pamphlets. And right on the front they say things like, “A human being can survive for three to five days without food or water. Jesus needs you to be ready for His coming. Do YOU have the supplies you need?”

The pamphlets probably had all kinds of good tips for how to deal with situations like the one I was in now. But I’d never gotten past the front cover before I put them in the recycle bin. I was sorry for that now. Billy was the kind of person who always had a knife strapped to his shin. He would have had ideas about how to deal with this.

“This” was sitting in the back of the car with Devina on one side and Jack on the other. Jane was at the wheel, chatting merrily as if this was a perfectly normal trip, talking about “traffic problems on the A4.”

As we went, everything seemed to slip away from me, like the buildings were fading from existence as I saw them for the last time. The roads were rolled up. The spare sky went into a box. Because, I felt sure, I would not come this way again. I looked at the names on the signs of places we were passing—Fulham, Hammersmith, Chiswick. I could try to fight, I could throw myself against the back window or grab Jane by the neck or do something…That something would only get me pushed down in the seat. It would get me hurt, and it would get people I love killed.

I was going to the country.

“We’re coming up on Barnes, now,” Jane said. “It’s where Marc Bolan died. You probably have never heard of Marc Bolan, but he was one of my favorites. Crashed into a tree. Terrible and shocking. When we do our work, Marc is one person I’d love to help.”

“What work?” I asked.

“We’re going to defeat death,” she said. It was very matter of fact, like she was saying, “We’re going to have a bake sale.”

“Oh,” is all I could manage.

“Have you ever heard of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Rory?” Jane smoothly negotiated a roundabout. “In ancient Greece, it was understood that Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, presided over the fecundity of the earth. Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld. Demeter forced him to return her daughter, but you see, Persephone had done the one thing that you shouldn’t do in Hades—she had eaten the food of the dead—and was forced to return to the underworld part of each year. In their honor, the Greeks had the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which initiates were shown the real nature of life and death. Now, we think these things are just stories—except, of course, that the ancient Greeks were correct. Death, as you have noticed, is not the fixed state that most people believe it is. Do you agree?”

“Sure?” I said, because it seemed like the right thing to say to this terrifying speech that seemed to be going into a deeply bad place.

“They may have spun a colorful tale around it, but they were aware of the reality of life and death. Their mysteries, their rituals—they were experiments. And those experiments started to bring about changes. They made us, Rory. Those who achieved the highest of the mysteries, the hierophants and the initiates, they developed the sight. They began to perforate the wall between the living and the dead. Somewhere, far, far back in your family history, there was a great mystic, someone who achieved this wonderful state. We are all, in that sense, related.”

“Family,” Jack said.

“Family indeed,” Jane replied.

“But the great work was destroyed. The Temple of Demeter was sacked. The Christians took over, and the mysteries were thought to be destroyed, the knowledge gone. But knowledge lives on. The rituals continue. Which is why we did what we did this morning. The psychic, of course.”

“Why her? What did she do?”

“We needed a victim, someone in the right general area. Someone whose death would arouse suspicion. Someone we couldn’t be linked to. A relatively insecure building where it was easy to get in and out. She was perfect. The death of a psychic so close to the Wexford grounds—we’ve put enough in play to keep your friends busy for a while. And Jack had a blood debt to pay. In the original mysteries, it was thought you had to be free of ‘blood guilt,’ that you couldn’t have killed anyone. But we are performing the advanced mysteries now, and now a blood debt is required. You need to meet it in order to be initiated.”

Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a piece of cloth, soaked in blood.

“Jack has proven himself ready,” Jane said. “As has Devina.”

“Mum’s boyfriend,” Devina said lightly.

“And you?” I asked Jane.

“The man in Yorkshire,” she said. “The one I told you about, the one who attacked me. It may sound horrible, Rory, but we have all removed people from society who needed to be removed…”

“What did the psychic ever do?” I said. “She was innocent!”

“You think that’s innocent? Someone who pretends to see into the future? Someone who tricks people for money? It’s because of people like her that the good name of the true religion is sullied and lost.”

I know a true believer when I see one—that high fervor, that total conviction, the calm that explodes into emotion in a moment. I was in a car full of conviction, full of belief in ancient Greek rituals and destroying death. And murderers.

The detour was taking us through a series of very tight lanes, barely wide enough to hold a car. Outside, England was normal and quiet, just living a December day. People would be getting ready for Christmas. Doing their jobs. Thinking about what to have for dinner. Cyclists rode past us on occasion. All that separated me from that world was a car door. But I could not get out.

“I would have fallen in with people like that,” Jane finally went on, “New Agers, nonsense spiritualists, but I was lucky. I met my friends. They taught me about the true history of the sight. They had used their wealth to invest in knowledge. They traveled to India, to Egypt, to Greece. They collected books. They talked to seers. They brought the knowledge back to London, and they made the ultimate sacrifice to help us all, to gain control of our own destinies. It’s been left to me to continue their work, to help them…and now…you. You are a transformed being. You are proof that what we believe is correct and possible.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just…”

“You don’t even know what you are,” Jane said. “But we will show you your true potential. And then…”

And then we all jerked forward, all at once, with the impact.

We’d plowed directly into the side of a police car.

I suppose, on some level, I’d suspected it. Like everything else today, I hadn’t really understood it fully—it made no sense—but it shouldn’t have surprised me. I had reached the point where surprises were no longer really possible.

The police car had come shooting out of a small lane just as our car had approached it, and had taken a heavy impact in the passenger’s side. Our car made a sickly sound, but was still running. The door of the police car opened, and Stephen stepped out, a trickle of blood running down the side of his face. At the same moment, there was a thud and a hiss on one side of the back of the car. Then a clank, then a similar thud and hiss on the other side. Boo and Callum then approached the back windows at the same moment. Boo had a crowbar in her hand. They had taken out the tires.

All of which would have attracted a lot of attention, but we were between two blind sides of buildings on a small street. The crash itself probably didn’t make that much noise.

Stephen approached the driver’s window like a policeman performing a normal traffic stop. He was walking stiffly, and he wiped away the blood on the side of his face.

Jane rolled down the window.

“Hello, Officer,” she said politely. “You’ve ruined my car.”

“I’d like Rory to get out,” Stephen replied.

“And why should she do that? I don’t think you have any legal right to remove her.”

“She’s a minor who’s been reported missing. Either she gets out or I assure you that the full weight of the London police force will be brought to bear on this car.”

“Well, I don’t think Rory wants to leave, do you, Rory?”

I did not reply.

“This is all quite illegal,” Jane said. “Police brutality doesn’t even begin to cover it. We certainly won’t be jailed for this.”

“You’re right,” Stephen replied. “Now get out.”

Boo was wedging the crowbar into the space between the door and the body of the car on Devina’s side. She popped the door open, grabbed Devina, and pulled her out. Callum remained on Jack’s side, his hands pressed against the glass of the window.

“Get out of the car, Rory,” Stephen said. “This is over.”

I slid over toward the open door. Boo pushed Devina aside and took me by the shoulders.

“You all right?”

“Fine.”

Devina didn’t move—she just stared at us both.

“Come on,” Boo said, guiding me away. “Come on. We need to leave now.”

But I stayed where I was.

“You are making a mistake,” Jane said. “If you try to take me, that will be kidnapping. You will be prosecuted. I’m going to call my solicitor about this vandalization of my car and assault on my young friends. You’ll never hear the end of this.”

“I look forward to it,” Stephen said. “You’ll be walking home. Which will be under surveillance. As will every vehicle registered to it, and every person known to have lived under its roof. Nothing you do from now on will be unobserved. On the street, cameras will turn and focus on you. And if anything happens to anyone connected with Rory’s life, I’ll personally see to it that every moment of what remains of your miserable life is spent in the maximum amount of suffering.”

He said all of that as if rattling off a grocery list.

“Oh, you do go on, don’t you?” Jane said.

“Come on,” Boo said again. And this time, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. Boo was strong. She could have thrown me over her shoulder if she felt like it.

The police car was clearly not drivable, so Boo hustled me away, back down the lane.

“I can’t go,” I said. “They know—”

“We can’t stay, Ror. Come on, come on, we can’t stay here.”

Someone turned down the lane and saw the crash. She started to walk toward us. Boo pulled me harder, shoving the crowbar inside of her coat. Callum joined us in a few smooth strides.

“Just keep walking,” he said, taking my arm on the other side. “Walk away. Let Stephen deal with this.”

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“Stephen put his phone in your pocket when we were at Dawn’s. It sounds like he didn’t think you were going to listen to him and go back to school. We used it as a GPS. Who are those people?”

“That was my therapist,” I said.

“And that’s put me off therapy for life,” Callum replied. “Do you have money? We know you emptied your bank account.”

I had forgotten about the roll of fifties and twenties in my pocket. When I reached in for it, I felt the phone.

“That’ll be enough,” Callum said. “We’ll find a taxi to take us back to the flat…”

“They know where the flat is,” I said. “They know about you, where my parents live. They have Charlotte…”

That last one hit me all over again. Someone, somewhere had Charlotte.

“What do you mean?” Boo said.

“I mean, they had her. I saw her in the house. She was in the bedroom one minute, the next she was gone. They said I had to go with them or…”

“What?” Callum said. “How did we miss them getting her out of the house? We were parked up right outside.”

“They kept talking about some house in the country. That’s where they were taking me…Oh, my God. I’m sorry. This is my fault. They knew all this stuff, and I went…I listened to them…”

I started to shake, and Boo tightened her hold around my shoulders.

“Phone it in,” she said to Callum.

Callum made the call to someone to report Charlotte’s abduction. Boo stayed with me. Stephen came jogging along a few moments later, fast, if a little unsteady on his feet. Without a word, he reached into my pocket and took out the phone, then he stepped away from us and made a call. I just heard a few clipped words, like “cleanup” and a street name.

“You all right?” Boo asked, looking at the blood on Stephen’s face.

“I played rugby. I’ve had worse. We need to get out of here.”

“Flat’s not safe,” Callum said, coming back over. “They know the address. We could have more of them waiting for us there.”

“Right,” Stephen said. He wiped away a rivulet of blood that was creeping down his cheek. It left a streak on the side of his face.

“Does Thorpe want us to come in?” Boo asked.

“We can’t walk into an MI5 building with a missing person. Rory’s in the system now. She’ll be caught on about a million cameras, and they do use facial recognition there, so no. We need to go somewhere and lay low and regroup…”

The blood trickled down again.

“Right. I know where we can go. It’s in Maida Vale.”

24

MAIDA VALE WAS A HEAVILY TREED AND DISCREET SECTION of northwest London, just above Paddington station. Quiet and secure brick houses with walled gardens and rows and rows of identical buildings in one solid block, side by side. There were commercial streets with pink and white cupcake shops and nonchain coffee places, stores where you could buy cashmere baby blankets, imported green tea from Japan, French cookware, and jeans so expensive one could only assume that they had been hand-sewn by monks who chanted prayers for the thighs of the would-be wearers. Stephen directed the cab to a series of golden brick apartments.

“What is this place?” Boo asked as Stephen punched in a code to gain access to the lobby.

“My father’s flat. He uses it when he comes to London for work. I think he’s in Switzerland right now. I hope he is, anyway.”

“What exactly does your dad do?” Callum asked.

“Banking,” Stephen said.