got into the car, and Stephen shut the door. He turned on the engine and turned the heat on full blast. Gusts of warm air roared out of the vents and directly into my face. I reached over and turned it down.
“I thought you might be cold,” he said.
“I am. It feels good. I just threw up.”
“She was too fast for me to stop her,” he said. “Sometimes they move quickly, more quickly than us. I couldn’t stop her.”
I’d seen it. I knew that was true. There was nothing he could have done to stop her if she’d been moving as fast as she really wanted to go. Ghosts are quick when they want to be.
Still, I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy. I maintained a steely silence for a few moments.
“Be mad at me if you want,” he said. “But everything I’ve done has been for good reasons.”
“Like what?”
He took off his black glasses and rubbed them on his leg. His leg bounced a little with tension.
“Rory, I just . . . it’s . . . it’s very complicated.”
“Try me.”
“Rory . . .”
“What’s Thorpe doing?” I said. “Over there, by the door?”
Thorpe wasn’t over by the door. I’d just said that to distract him. I yanked the keys out of the ignition.
“Tell me,” I said, shoving them down my shirt and holding them against my chest. “Tell me, or we go nowhere. Tell me or I’ll start screaming. Do you want me to draw lots of attention to what’s going on here? I’ll totally do it.”
A deep sigh from Stephen. He banged his head gently against his headrest and stared up at the car ceiling.
“They were going to shut us down. They were happy with the results of the Ripper case, but without a terminus, they didn’t know how we could still function.”
“You still have one,” I said. “What about the one in the bathroom? The one Jo used on Newman?”
He reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic vial, then he switched on the interior light so I could look at it. It contained a gray stone.
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s gone cloudy, as you can see. It doesn’t work anymore. We’ve tried. It’s like a blown lightbulb.”
“What about the two in the river?” I asked. “Can you get them back? You can get things out of the Thames—guns and evidence and stuff, right?”
“Guns, maybe, on a good day. But not two extremely small stones. The Thames is a powerful tidal river. Presumably the stones drifted a bit before they sank, and now they’re mixed in somewhere in the millions of tons of sediment and sludge. So you are the only terminus. Then I saw what happened to you . . . I needed to show Thorpe that there was one terminus left. I also needed a good reason to bring you back. I was never comfortable with you being sent away like that, on your own, with no support. This solved both problems. We’ll be allowed to keep going for a while now that he’s seen.”
Stephen was right. I couldn’t have stayed there on my own, with no one to talk to. He reached over and took the vial and put it back in his pocket.
“And how did you do it?” I asked. “How did you bring me back?”
“Thorpe did that. I honestly don’t know how he set it up. I only know he made a very strong suggestion to your therapist that you should be returned to London. He didn’t give me any details.”
Of course. Now it all made sense. Julia’s sudden decision that I should return to Wexford. Her obvious lie about all the work I’d done in therapy.
“It was up to you,” Stephen said. “You were asked if you wanted to return. You said yes.”
“But I didn’t say I would just . . . put on some freak show for Thorpe, or blow up some woman. You could have told me where we were going.”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d agree to just . . . doing it. But I thought if you saw the pain Diane was in . . . it was appropriate use, Rory. She was in agony. Now, I’ve told you everything. Give me back the keys. Now.”
The keys were sweat-stuck to my chest. I knocked them loose and they fell gracefully into my crotch. I picked them up and handed them over. He started the car again and was putting it into reverse, then stopped.
“Boo and Callum,” he said, his voice smooth and quiet again. “They know you’re back. I can take you to see them now, and we can talk about it. If you want. We can go right now, or we can do it some other time. I don’t know how you’re feeling.”
The rapid change in emotions, the way he wasn’t looking at me . . . he was still feeling very guilty. His reasons may have been good, but he still felt bad about using me like that, about keeping things from me.
I did want to see Boo and Callum. Truth be told, I was still glad to see Stephen. And to tell even more truth, it was just a little bit fun to play with his guilt. And he did feel guilty. And after the last few weeks, I deserved whatever fun I could get.
“We can go now,” I said in a low voice, rubbing a clear patch in the fog on the window.
We turned past Waterloo station and onto the fairly quiet residential streets beyond. He drove down a street with a chip shop on the corner and pulled the car into the only empty space along the street and turned off the engine.
“We have a new flat—” he began.
“I know,” I said.
This seemed to surprise him. He knew something about me, but I knew something about him as well.
“Oh. Right. Well, the owner of our old flat decided it was time to start charging three thousand pounds a month again. So that was that, really. Since we did such a good job with the Ripper, Her Majesty’s Government has given us a proper office and somewhere to live. It’s just here.”
He pointed at one of the many largely identical buildings along the road—plain brick houses in a row, the kind found all over the city. Definitely not as fancy as the old place.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “I told Callum and Boo there was a meeting tonight, but not what it was about. For two reasons. One, I didn’t know what would happen. It was possible that you wouldn’t go through with it or it wouldn’t work. And two,
