The Shadow Cabinet (9 page)

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand—

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep—while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One
from the pitiless wave?

Edgar Allan Poe,

“A Dream Within a Dream”

8

W
HAT
J
EROME
WAS
DO
ING
HERE
,
AT
H
IGHGATE
, I
HAD
NO
idea, but he and the girl were totally consumed in the process of getting the gate open.

“Are you okay?” he asked, leaning into the gate. “Is that smoke?”

“Kind of,” I said. “I'll be okay. I just need to get out.”

The smoke was dissipating, but it was still pretty strong inside the tomb, and it hurt my throat and eyes. I pressed my face to the gate to breathe the fresh, cold air.

“Hang on a moment,” the girl said, pulling off her backpack. “I have something.”

She pulled out some kind of white tube about a foot long, and she used it to whack the crap out of the lock until it fell open and I stumbled out into the murk.

“Bike pump,” she said, catching her breath as she held it up. “Always handy. Are you all right?”

I leaned over my legs to catch my breath and nodded heavily. Jerome was at my side, not touching me, but leaning down to look at me.

“Are you?” he said.

“Yeah.”

I saw him looking at my hair, then back at the still-smoking tomb.

“Who locked you in there?” he asked.

“It was . . . an accident.”

“You locked yourself in a tomb and set a fire?”

“I'm fine.”

“You don't seem fine.”

“Fine,” I said again, standing and trying to smile.

The girl tucked her bike pump back into her bag, which she reapplied to her back. Then she came over and extended her hand.

“You're Rory!” she announced.

Unable to contradict this, I nodded and took her hand. Her grip was firm, serious, and at the conclusion of the gesture, I felt like I may have sealed an important deal on behalf of my client.

“I'm Freddie,” she said. “Freddie Sellars. Freddie isn't short for Fredericka. It's my name. But your name is short for Aurora? Very pretty name. Aurora. The Roman goddess of dawn.
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun should in the farthest east begin to draw the shady curtains from Aurora's bed
 . . .”

When I stared blankly, she filled in the missing information.

“
Romeo and Juliet,
” she said. “I memorized quite a lot of Shakespeare for my A-levels, and now it keeps popping out all over the place.”

While she spoke, Jerome stood there, staring at me like I was a bird that had flown out of the depths of his cereal. The last time I'd seen him, we were on the green at Wexford, and I was impulsively dumping him because I couldn't keep up with the lies anymore. There were, to put it as mildly as possible, a few questions he probably wanted to ask me. This girl knew my name and seemed to be the only person who had any outward appearance of understanding the situation.

“I told you,” Freddie said to Jerome. “I did tell you.”

“You did,” Jerome said, never taking his eyes from me. “But stil—”

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“We heard you,” Freddie said.

This wasn't really an answer, but to be fair, my answers weren't answers either. We were three people in a graveyard, and none of us should have been there, and no one was talking first.

“This is probably confusing,” Freddie said. “Maybe I should explain. Possibly not here, though. You need to get out of there. We should all sit down, maybe have a cup of tea and—”

“Here's fine,” I said.

“Oh. There's a coffee shop and a pub just up Swain's Lane in Highgate Village. I know the place fairly well. It's quiet in the winter—it's mostly there for tourists. Not many people around. I imagine maybe avoiding very crowded places, and . . . well, it's quite a story and it might go down well with some refreshment. And it
is
raining—”

“Here's fine,” I said again.

“Oh. Right. Of course. Well, we're here because of the Ripper case. Jerome and I met online, on a discussion board. And . . . well, this is a bit awkward . . . You see, I have a great interest in this case. I have been following it quite closely. I identified a few people working on it, and I found out where they were based. Then Jerome put the news up on the board that you were gone from school—he posted before the BBC—and as he did so, I spotted you going into a flat behind Waterloo station. I had my bicycle, and I took the opportunity.”

So much for all of Thorpe's precautions. Busted by a girl and her trusty bicycle. Well played, MI5.

“I was hanging about a bit, and today I saw you come here. I phoned Jerome and told him, and by the time I reached him, I'd lost you. But then he arrived and we were looking around and we heard you, so that's how we . . .”

“Can we have a moment?” Jerome asked.

“Oh! Right! Yes. Right. How about I walk back to the gate? Yes. I'll wait there. And perhaps then maybe we could get out of the rain and have a chat?”

Jerome turned to Freddie, and she flushed red and hopped off down the lane of tombs, leaving us alone.

I'd never been so happy to see someone. Well, almost. It was up there. Jerome was familiar. Jerome was about normal life and Stephen not being dead and awkward things that still made some kind of sense. I found myself warming, wanting to throw my arms around him, to drink in everything that was ordinary about him. I wanted everything to stop being terrible. I wanted a hug.

This was also acutely terrible, because Jerome was now staring at me in a graveyard, and he wanted an explanation.

“What's going on?” he said quietly.

“It's really complicated,” I said.

“I gathered that. But you have to tell me something. Where's Charlotte?”

I ran my hand through my hair and was confused when there seemed to be very little hair there to run a hand through. I kept forgetting.

“I don't know,” I said. “She's not with me.”

“What were you doing in that tomb?”

“I was looking at something, and the gate closed in the wind.”

“And then it caught on fire?”

“I was . . . smoking.”

“You smoke now,” he said. He didn't ask. He didn't believe me.

“It's been stressful.”

“I know,” he said. “For everyone. Jaz is with your parents right now.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you spoke to them, and they're frantic. They thought she might know where you went. And she was worried for them, so she's staying with them at their hotel.”

“Hotel?”

“They came to London when you left Wexford. Rory . . . everyone's freaking out. And you're . . .”

As established, in a tomb on fire.

“You need to tell me something,” he said. “I'm not leaving until you tell me something. Is the Ripper case still going on? Are you a witness? Are you in hiding?”

“That's . . . kind of it? It's—”

“Don't say complicated. Tell me something.”

“I'd tell you if I could,” I said.

“Tell me how you ended up in there,” he said, pointing at the tomb. “Really. You were screaming.”

He looked at me warningly.

“The truth is it was an accident,” I said. “I'm a moron. Did you see anyone else around? It was just me, being an idiot. Have you
met
me? This is the kind of thing that happens to me.”

Oh, Jerome. I was always lying to him. What choice did I have? I don't think he accepted this entirely, but there was enough of a ring of truth about what I'd said to quiet him for a moment.

“Who's this
girl
?” I asked.

“She is who she said she is. Her name is Freddie Sellars. She's really into the Ripper case, like me. More than me. Way more than me. Apparently she was following the investigators. She's kind of intense, and I thought she might be crazy, but she told me she knew where you were. I went along with her, but I didn't actually think she'd be right.”

“But you went anyway?”

“She was right,” he said, his voice rising a bit. “She did know where you were.”

“So, that's all you know about her?”

“What does it matter?” he asked.

“Everything kind of matters now,” I said, tightening my arms around my chest and looking around. Old Jim was nowhere in sight. It was time to go. It was probably best not to go anywhere with them, but my throat was burny from the smoke, I was shivering in the damp and the cold, and I had a feeling that Freddie Sellars—whoever she was—had a lot more to say. Because if she knew about the Waterloo flat, that meant she knew about Stephen, or Callum, or Boo.

“Listen,” I said, “I'll come to this pub, and we'll sit and talk. I'll tell you what I can. I can't tell you much.”

Jerome took his hands from his coat pockets and for a moment floated them in my direction.

“All right,” he said. “Come on.”

He offered me his crooked arm like he used to when we dated. I wondered if somehow our breaking up had been canceled out by the overbearing drama of the days that followed. Maybe I could pick up my life again, right now, by walking out arm in arm. I could go to my parents, see Jazza. He was literally offering me a way out of the woods.

I tucked my hands into my coat pockets, and we walked out of the cemetery side by side.

9

F
REDDIE
S
ELLARS
WAS
WAITING
FOR
US
OUTSIDE
THE
GATE
. We informed her that we were willing to go for the drink, if the pub was quiet and out of the way, and she assured us it was most quiet and out of the way. As we walked down the lane to the village, there was no dead air. Freddie was bountiful in her knowledge of Highgate Cemetery and spent the whole time pointing out various tombs and talking about how the Victorians invented a culture and industry of death.

Everyone was a tour guide today.

And so on, out the gates and up the road to a pub called the Flask. It was one of those places so picturesque that my American brain assumed fakery and the hand of Disney—except of course it was real. They always were. It was right off the road, with a wide stone patio full of tables and a cheery red sign. Freddie wanted us to go inside, but I said I wanted to stay out. There was an area off to the side with a bit of roofing, a kind of porch unconnected to the building. No one was out there, and it was tucked off in the corner of the courtyard in a place where no one was likely to immediately look.

“I'm kind of dying for a Coke,” I said, pulling out some of the money I'd been given.

“I'd love an herbal tea,” Freddie said, carefully counting out a few pounds of her own.

Jerome went into the pub, casting a glance over his shoulder as he left. When he was safely inside, I set to work.

“I need to know how you found me,” I said.

“I told you! I—”

“Followed people. For how long?”

“For some time,” she said.

“Who did you follow?”

“There are three of them,” she said. “A tall one, who I think is named Stephen—he wears a police uniform. A very fit person whose name I've never been able to catch. And a gorgeous girl who I believe may be called Boo? But I must have heard that wrong. Unless it's a joke.”

“A joke?”

“Because . . .” Freddie drew a sudden breath and shifted in her seat. “Oh, dear. I imagined how this would go if we met, but I didn't . . . Well, boo. Boo. As in . . . well. What says ‘boo'?”

I knew what said boo, but I wanted to hear her say it.

“I'm from Cambridge,” she said. “My parents are both profs. My mum is associate chair of ancient history at one of the colleges, and my dad is a behavioral psychologist. When I was fifteen, we were off for six weeks one summer when my dad was doing research in Turkey. I was swimming at the beach in Cirali and I was stung by a jellyfish—a whacking great
Rhopilema nomadica,
to be specific. I had a terrible allergic reaction. It almost killed me.”

She looked to see how I reacted. Suspicion confirmed.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

There was no point in lying to her. Not about this.

“I choked at dinner,” I said.

A creeping flush came up over her jawline and spread across her cheeks as she saw she'd hit home.

“It's true, then,” she said. “I was right. You're like me. I wasn't sure. But I was fairly sure. I felt fairly sure, and—”

“What do you know about the Ripper?” I said, glancing toward the pub door. Freddie flushed with excitement when she saw how this conversation looked to be going.

“I had a theory.” She was talking faster. “No appearance on CCTV. The culprit turns out to be a random drifter, someone with no known identity, no story. Someone tremendously clever and yet utterly no one at all, who dies very conveniently at the end of a chase. No trial. No more information. I started following the case not because I cared about the Ripper, but because I suspected what he was. I actually didn't think I'd be
right,
but . . . Can I ask, what were you doing in the cemetery?”

“I was there trying to get information from someone called the Resurrection Man.”

“The Resurrection Man? You mean a body snatcher?”

“What?”

“A resurrection man,” she said, “was what they called people who used to get cadavers for medical students back when there was a shortage. This was only a bit illegal, so it was fairly popular. It was regarded as a problem when some of them started to murder people in order to sell the bodies. Mostly, though, they went after freshly dug graves, which is why so many graveyards had watch houses or bars or gates over the tombs.”

A body snatcher—that cemetery was his. It began to make sense.

“Is there a reason you know all this?” I asked.

“There was a very good exhibition in the Museum of London about it recently,” she said. “But because of what I am, I've made this sort of thing my field of study. I'm a student at King's, in history, specializing in English folklore and religious history, which covers quite a lot of death customs. And I—”

“Does Jerome know? You didn't tell him any of this. About you, about me?”

“God, no! No. How do you tell someone that the Ripper is a . . . well, a dead person? But he's going to want some explanation.”

Yes, he probably would, now that Freddie had brought him here.

“So what do we tell him?” she asked. “I always prefer telling the truth. It's dashed complicated, but if we both tell him—”

“We don't tell him.”

“We don't have to,” she said quickly, “but he's going to ask questions. None of this makes any sense unless you know the major piece of information here, and I think you'd be surprised how—”

“We don't tell him,” I said.

Here I was, being just like Stephen, who hadn't wanted me to know that I was seeing ghosts, even though I was seeing ghosts. It was Boo who'd argued that denying reality was weird and cruel and wrong. But Jerome didn't have the sight. This was different.

“So why did you follow them?” I asked.

“Because . . .” she said, and she got a little shy and flushed. “Because I want to join.”

I tried to look like I had no idea what she was talking about, but that didn't really work. I mean, she clearly knew.

“How did you even know they existed?”

“It's been rumored for years that there used to be some part of the police that handled ghosts but that Margaret Thatcher had it shut down because she didn't like ghosts. Which wouldn't surprise me—she didn't even like
beards.
No one in her cabinet could have a beard, so I can't imagine she had much time for ghost police. In any case, I do a lot of research on this topic. No one knew for certain, but there was a rumor that it had started back up. I started to track sites that were known for hauntings, places that had problems. I found a Tube platform that had started to have a lot of issues—you can follow this easily online—and I got there in time to see a woman on the platform. But she was a spirit. And then in came this tall person in a police uniform, and I saw that he could see her too. They closed the platform for a bit, but I watched him speak to her. And when he left, I followed him. That's how I started. Then when the Ripper came along, everything came together. I started following your story too.”

She looked a bit bashful.

“They said there was a witness. Plenty of people were visiting your school to look at the crime scene, so I went along as well. I knew you had to be . . . I didn't mean to follow you. I've been looking for them so long. Do you think they'd take me? The tall one, is he in charge? Stephen, is that his name?”

I was glad that Jerome emerged with the drinks, because I wasn't about to answer any questions about Stephen. Freddie stopped talking a little too suddenly. He looked at the two of us, and he was well aware that we had stopped talking because he came over. Jerome was anything but stupid.

“Look,” I said, “I'm okay . . . despite how you found me.”

His expression suggested that he rejected the idea that I was okay, largely due to the way they had just found me.

“So,” he said, “this is all about the Ripper. The case is still going on. So he's not dead?”

“You know,” Freddie said, bobbing her tea bag nervously, “possibly you should drink that pint. And then—”

I prepared to cut off whatever she was about to say. This was not the time. There would likely never be a time to rip apart the fabric of Jerome's reality. I debated jumping up and dragging her bodily away from the table. It turned out that was completely unnecessary, because we had company. For the second time today, a familiar face popped up next to me.

“A word,” Thorpe said.