The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [98]
There was nothing there but trash—old office chairs and rolls of discarded carpet and a Dumpster filled with scrap wood and broken pieces of wall.
“It’s us,” Stephen said.
“Oh, thank God,” said a voice.
Callum emerged from behind the Dumpster. Even with all that was going on, it was hard not to take notice of this: he wore only his underpants and his socks and shoes. The underpants were those tight kind—not tighty-whities, but the slightly longer-legged ones that looked kind of sporty. His legs were hairier than I would have expected, and he had a long tattoo of what looked like a vine running from somewhere just above the leg of the underwear to a few inches above his knee.
I don’t think I hid my staring very well either.
“Go ahead and change,” Stephen said, handing me the bag. “I’ll go and get the car.”
“Please be quick,” Callum added. “This is not as fun as it appears.”
I stepped over the boards and got myself behind the Dumpster. It was cold and dusty back there, and it only got colder and more unpleasant when I shed my outfit. I tossed out the clothes as I finished with them, so by the time I emerged, Callum was fully dressed, doing up the buttons and zippers. This was slightly disappointing.
Stephen pulled up at the end of the alley, and we got into the car. The spot was probably illegal, but being in a police car, he could do what he liked. He had opened a laptop that was attached to a center console in the front of the car, and it appeared he was going into a police database.
“There’s an Alexander Newman in here,” he said. “Says he died in 1993, which was the year of the King William Street incident, but his file doesn’t mention it. Says he was Special Branch. Medical degree from Oxford. Trained as a psychiatrist at St. Barts Hospital, three years on the force . . . What was this man doing on a drugs squad?”
“Is this what we should be worrying about right now?” I asked.
“He wants you to go where he died,” Stephen said, not turning around. “Clearly, this place has significance to what’s going on. The more we know, the better we can determine what to do next—or what he’ll do next. There’s also something very strange about this case file. A case like that, six officers dead, there should be endless documentation. This file seems light.”
“You just love the paperwork, don’t you?” Callum asked.
“I’m saying that for a case of this magnitude, there should be hundreds of pages. But all that’s in here are the general report, the coroner’s report, and four officer statements. Basically all this says is that a firearms unit was dispatched to the scene to try to take control of the situation, but by the time they got there, all the officers were dead. According to this, there were four officers in the armed response vehicle.”
He typed some more. I looked out of the window to the dark street we had parked on. Not a person in sight. There was a CCTV camera pointed right at us. That was almost funny now.
“It looks like one has died and two are retired. But one’s still working—Sergeant William Maybrick. City of London Police, Wood Street. He’ll be on duty tonight.”
“How do you know?” Callum asked.
“Because everyone is on duty tonight,” Stephen replied. “I think it’s worth the time to go and find out what he knows. Sirens on, I can get there in five minutes.”
32
ONE THING ABOUT STEPHEN—HE COULD REALLY drive. He power-shifted through the gears as we tore into the City, ripping past banks and skimming inches away from the cabs and very expensive-looking cars that still floated around the streets. I caught a part of some snarky remark Callum made about Stephen celebrating a lot of birthdays by doing racing track days. Stephen told him to shut up.
We came to an actual screeching halt in front of the station. Because we were in a police car, we got to pull right up front. The Wood Street police station looked like a fortress built entirely of blocks of white stone. There were a few windows, and a big set of brown