The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [80]
“The Shades?”
“It’s another word for ghosts. MI5 are called the spooks, and we were a lot smaller and stranger. A shady little branch. I think they used to call us Scotland Graveyard as well. Anyway, we were around for years. Very secret. Never very large. But in the Thatcher years . . . someone got wind of the group and didn’t like it. I don’t know what happened . . . something political. But they shut it down in the early nineties. Two years ago, they decided to start it up again. They found me. I was the first one.”
“How did they find you?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “And classified.”
“So, are you a cop? A real one?”
“I am,” he said. “I was trained. The uniform is real. The car was issued to me.”
There was a jingle of keys in the door, and Callum entered, wearing a London Tube uniform.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “I got your message.”
“There’s been an accident,” Stephen said.
“What sort of accident?”
“Boo—”
“Boo got hit by a car,” I said. “The Ripper came after me. Boo tried to help, and he threw her in front of a car.”
For a moment, Callum couldn’t speak. He leaned against the counter and put his hand to his forehead.
“Is she—”
“She’s hurt,” Stephen said, “but she’s alive. I had to get Rory away from the scene.”
“Alive? Conscious alive? How alive?”
“She wasn’t conscious at the scene,” Stephen said.
Callum just stared at me.
“It’s not her fault,” Stephen said.
“I know that,” Callum replied, but he wasn’t acting like he knew that. “Please tell me she got him. Please tell me that. Please let that be the upshot of all this . . .”
“It sounds like she tried,” Stephen said. “But no.”
“It was a mistake to send her in alone,” Callum snapped. “I told you it was a mistake. I told you we should have just stayed at the school.”
“We needed to investigate—”
“Investigate what? What exactly have we come up with so far?”
“He spoke to Rory,” Stephen said, his voice rising. “We learned a few things. We learned he had the sight when he was alive. That’s probably why he’s been trailing Rory. That’s probably why he killed at Wexford. He found someone who could see him, who could hear him.”
“Oh, good,” Callum said. “Well, then. Sounds like we’ve solved it.”
“Callum!” Stephen’s voice went deep when he yelled. I could feel the sonic boom in my stomach. “You aren’t helping. So either stop it now or go outside and walk it off.”
For a moment, I thought they were going to have a fight—a real, physical one. Callum stood up, straightened, and stormed out of the room. I heard a door slam somewhere else in the apartment.
“Sorry,” Stephen said quietly. “He’ll calm down in a moment.”
I could hear things being thrown around in the other room. Then the door opened again and Callum joined us, rattling the table and spilling our tea with the force of sitting down.
“So what do we know?” he asked.
“Someone is clearing up the red tape. He’ll tell me when it’s all right for me to take Rory back to Wexford. Until then, we should stay here with her.”
“We should be out there, dealing with him.”
“I’d like that too,” Stephen said, “but we have no idea where he’s gone. But in the meantime, we can work with what he’s said this evening. He’s been communicating.”
Stephen quickly brought Callum up to speed on the various messages while I drank some tea and kept my head down. I was a little frightened of both of them at the moment. Boo was hurt because of me.
“There was something written on a wall after one of the Ripper killings in 1888,” Stephen said. “After the fourth murder—a bit of anti-Semitic graffiti. Most people think it was a false lead, that it wasn’t written by the Ripper at all—or if it was, it was probably written to lead the police down the wrong path. This message feels wrong . . .”
“Maybe he just wanted to turn up at that Rippercon thing,” Callum said. “Do a signing for the fans.”
“Possibly,