The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [44]
“Out,” he said, opening the door. “We need this room.”
There were cries of protest, but Jerome pushed the door open wider.
“Study use only,” he said. “Out.”
“Using your prefect powers for evil?” I asked as they shuffled past us. One of them was considerably taller than Jerome and looked down at him with palpable disdain, but Jerome didn’t care. He was already setting up his computer.
“Shut the door,” he said. “Sit down.”
There were three chairs and a tiny table in the room. The room wasn’t wide enough for a fourth chair. It wasn’t really wide enough for the little table. I slipped in next to Jerome, who was logging on and pulling up a site.
“I have to warn you,” he said. “This is disturbing. But you should see it. Everyone’s going to see it soon enough.”
He was on a site called Ripperfiles. In the middle of the front page was a video screen. He hit the Play symbol.
The footage was in night vision, which meant that it had a greenish-gray cast, with bright white highlights. The first frames were of a garden and a patio with a few empty tables. I realized immediately that this had to be the Flowers and Archers.
After thirty seconds or so of this, a gate opened. Someone walked into the garden, very straight-backed and stiff. It was a woman. She was wearing a skirt and a coat. She crossed from the left of the frame to the right, until she was positioned almost perfectly in the eye of the camera, then she turned slowly.
Her eyes said it all. They were huge points of white light. She stood there, utterly unmoving except for a light heaving of constrained cries. Her attention seemed focused on something in front of her, just out of view. Then she jerked to the side, toppling against the fence and bouncing to the ground. She began to fight, arms flailing. It was only then that I realized that she wasn’t looking at someone outside of the camera’s range. There was simply no murderer there. The victim was well in the center of the yard, so her assailant should have been fully visible. But there was no one. She flailed at the air. Then there was a flash, a little glint of something streaking across the screen, and she went still. Her legs suddenly jerked up, so that the knees were bent and the heels placed on the ground. Then the knees were knocked open. Then a glint again.
Jerome reached over and hit Pause.
“You don’t want to see the rest,” he said. “I’m sorry I saw it.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What was that?”
“That was the footage from the pub. It wasn’t destroyed.”
“But it can’t be.”
“It is. A member of this site got it straight from the backup server. This is it.”
“It’s obviously just someone acting out the crime.”
“Honestly,” he said, “it’s real. This site . . . These people are serious. Obviously, something’s been done to the footage to remove the assailant, but no one can figure out what. This has been passed around to all kinds of technical experts, and no one can figure out what’s been done to it. This video? It’s going to be all over the place. Every conspiracy nut in the world is going to go crazy for this.”
The image was still frozen there—the woman on her back, the strange glint hanging in the air. Jerome closed the computer partway.
“The other night,” I said. “When we were sneaking back in. I saw someone.”
“You’re a witness?” he asked.
“I was,” I said. “They made me do something called an E-fit.”
“You did an E-fit?”
I explained to Jerome about the man—how he had appeared from around the corner, how he had seen me climbing back into the window. Jerome was completely staggered by this. His jaw dropped open slightly. He was fairly loose-jawed to begin with—hence his power to declare Total War on his food, his easy smiles, his ability to talk for ages. We had probably been this close before, shoved together on the benches of the refectory, but I became acutely aware that we were alone in this little study room. Study closet, really. And we were closer now than I remembered. We must have been