THE POLICE PACKED UP BY WEDNESDAY MORNING, and the press left as soon as the white tent came down. Jerome’s prediction about the video came true. By that afternoon, every news station on the planet was showing it. It was on the front page of every website. Even though hoaxes were an everyday occurrence, this video was proving hard to dismiss. Video experts had all had a look at it. Facial recognition software confirmed that the woman in the footage was the victim, Fiona Chapman. No one could explain the fact that the killer couldn’t be seen. And it was physically impossible that he was just avoiding the camera. Somehow, he had accessed the footage on both the hard disk and the server and erased himself. Some people thought he had special military cloaking technology.

Three students had been pulled from school. Teachers wanted to be able to leave the school grounds before it got dark at five. In the air, there was a deep sense of unease, everywhere.

As for the mad make-out session with Jerome, I wasn’t sure what it meant. It could have been a part of the general insanity. It could have been stress that kicked our hormones into gear like that. But the fact is, when you live with someone—or on the same campus, I mean—and you have a mad make-out session, you have two choices. You can either indicate that you enjoy your mad make-out sessions and intend to indulge in them at every given opportunity (i.e., Gaenor and Paul, her year twelve boyfriend, known to make out while eating shepherd’s pie, which is not a euphemism), or you do not acknowledge the make-out session, or indeed any physical attraction. There is no middle ground, not at boarding school. I told Jazza, of course. But no one else. Jerome seemed to be doing the same thing. In fact, I was pretty sure he hadn’t told Andrew.

On Wednesday night, Jazza and I sat on our respective beds doing homework while the news played on my computer. After the video came out, watching the news became a matter of habit. The topic, as ever, was the Ripper—in this case, the letter that had been received at the BBC the day before.

“This letter,” the newscaster said, “of course, is based on the famous ‘From Hell’ letter that was received by Mr. George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee on October 16, 1888. It’s the only letter out of the hundreds that came in that most Ripper experts think was actually from the killer. We now also know that there was more to the letter, which we didn’t hear. To discuss this, we have Mr. James Goode.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Please. Not again. Not again with this guy.”